Run for the hills! Piracy sites attracted 189bn visits in 2018, according to infringement-tracking firm Muso! But wait, run back from the hills! When the company released similar data a year ago for 2017, the total was more than 300bn visits! So arguably the story here is that the number of piracy visits has plummeted by 37% in a year.
The figures cover all forms of digital piracy: music, but also TV shows, films, software and publishing. Muso says that music accounted for 15.87% of the visits in 2018, which by our calculations means just under 30bn visits. That’s even better news, because the figure for 2017 was 73.9bn music-piracy visits – and thus they’ve fallen by a stonking 59.4% in the last year.
There’s some good detail in Muso’s findings, including the fact that around 60% of *all* piracy visits are to unlicensed web-streaming sites. That’s an area dominated by TV and film content, since music has plenty of non-piracy streaming options (from Spotify and SoundCloud to YouTube globally, plus the free tiers of services in India, China and the Middle East) to nix the need to look for unlicensed streams. Muso also notes that there was a 16% drop in visits to stream-ripping sites last year, which suggests the music industry’s efforts to shut down the bigger ones are paying off.
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