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While music piracy has been running rampant across the globe for years, there's one city that rules supreme: Gainesville, Florida.
According to CNBC, the city has been labeled the music "Pirate Capital" of the world, via a detailed global report into music piracy called the Digital Music Index (DMI).
Through an investigation of file-sharing activity carried out via the peer-to-peer protocol BitTorrent, the inaugural report published by the group shows that Americans downloaded 759 million songs illegally using BitTorrent downloading software in the first half of 2012.
Americans downloaded more than 97 million albums and singles using BitTorrent through June 2012 with Gainesville accounting for the top metro area for illegal downloads per capita in the U.S. with 0.57 per person in the first half of 2012. Gainesville was followed by Albany, Ga. (0.45), Fairbanks, Alaska (0.43), Lexington, Ky. (0.42), and Tallahassee, Fla. (0.42).
Total downloads for the top five cities were Gainesvillle 187,087; Albany 194,373; Fairbanks 47,924; Lexington 546,161, and Tallahassee 314,974.
Across the US, the most downloaded releases were in the rap genre: Lil Wayne and Drake's "The Motto" accounted for 438,038 downloads; Drake's "Take Care" (453,933); Jay-Z and Kanye West's "Watch The Throne" (365,987); Big Sean's "Finally Famous" (352,623); and Tyga's "Rack City" (304,292).
"While not all the music available on BitTorrent is unauthorized, the majority of songs delivered through the system are unlicensed, the report explains, and the U.S. still tops the list of the greatest music piracy users and abusers," writes CNBC.
Additionally, the DMI found that unlicensed file-sharing decreased slightly over the past six months in territories where services such as Spotify and Pandora were available.
Soundcloud.com has overtaken previous leader Myspace as the site with the most streams for new and breaking acts, while YouTube is the most popular website for listening to music online, with 33.5 billion plays in the last 12 months.
