New research unveiled by leading online anti-piracy company MUSO has highlighted that many seminal artists’ back catalogues’ are failing to be protected online.
Founded in 2008, MUSO now work with a number of key companies in the music industry, such as Demon Music Group and Essential Music & Marketing, in helping them protect their catalogues online. Empowering rights-holders, MUSO work by monitoring, analysing, detecting and responding to any potential risk involving digital piracy related activity. The company’s patented dashboard system scans millions of pages across the internet, protecting and defending online content.
Utilising their all-encompassing system, MUSO have exemplified the problem faced by legendary artists by analysing the online piracy levels for each. Unsurprisingly, The Beatles showed the highest level of online piracy. The Liverpool band’s material was found to be uploaded on a whopping 187,687 online files through a mixture of cyberlocker, torrents and illegal streaming sites – all of which are compliant with takedowns sent from MUSO. Estimating an average of 1000 downloads per file, this equates to nearly 190 million downloads per annum. The worrying fact is that some of these files have been live for 5 years or more and could have easily been tackled through MUSO’s system.
The rest of the list reads much the same, as a host of legendary artists fall prey to online piracy. Fleetwood Mac (72984 uploaded files), Bob Marley (60024 uploaded files) and Led Zepellin (59011 uploaded files) were all found to have material that was easily downloadable online. The figures do not even account for non-compliant sites such as the controversial Russian social network VK – a known hotbed of piracy activity which MUSO agreed a deal with to monitor back in August – meaning the piracy could be more widespread than these findings show.
Read the full list below:
- The Beatles – 187687 uploaded files
- Fleetwood Mac – 72984 uploaded files
- Bob Marley – 60024 uploaded files
- Led Zeppelin – 59011 uploaded files
- Cliff Richard – 56576 uploaded files
- Stevie Wonder – 45496 uploaded files
- Jimi Hendrix – 44093 uploaded files
- Elvis – 40794 uploaded files
- ABBA – 35193 uploaded files
- The Rolling Stones – 34444 uploaded files
To find out more about MUSO’s suite of piracy solutions, please visit Products.