The Beatles revolutionized both rock and roll and pop. The face of the music landscape today wouldn’t be what it is without the English band paving the way for every musician to ever write a song over the past half century. It comes as no surprise, then, that The Beatles have been named the most pirated artists on list compiled by MUSO, one of the leading anti-piracy monitoring companies. MUSO reported that exactly 186,876 illegal Beatles files have been removed from the internet. With an average of roughly 1,000 downloads per file, that totals about 190 million illegal downloads a year. Of course, while The Beatles are immensely popular, a reason for such a large number of illegal Beatles’ songs is because of their relatively late inclusion to iTunes. It was only three years ago when EMI, The Beatles’ record label, entered an agreement with Apple to bring the band’s entire catalog to the popular music service.
The full list of Top 10 illegally-downloaded artists is below. I’m not surprised by the majority of the names, but Fleetwood Mac is at second? REALLY?
1. The Beatles (187,687 uploaded files)
2. Fleetwood Mac (72,984 uploaded files)
3. Bob Marley (60,024 uploaded files)
4. Led Zeppelin (59,011 uploaded files)
5. Cliff Richard (56,576 uploaded files)
6. Stevie Wonder (45,496 uploaded files)
7. Jimi Hendrix (44,093 uploaded files)
8. Elvis Presley (40,794 uploaded files)
9. ABBA (35,193 uploaded files)
10. The Rolling Stones (34,444 uploaded files)
[via NME]