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Beyonce‘s surprise release of her self-titled visual album may have thwarted any leaks, but she was still a victim of having her album pirated nearly a quarter million times, according to Billboard.
Citing a report from Musicmetric, an English music data analysis company, Billboard says the singer’s project was illegally downloaded 240,000 times in its first week alone. Had those copies been purchased at the full retail price of $15.99, that would have been good for $3.8 million. As of December 18, Bey’s full music catalog was shared more than two million times through file sharing sites that use the BitTorrent download protocol. Of those shares, 239,131 were for Beyonce’s self-titled album, according to the Musicmetric report.
“The usefulness of BitTorrent data is that it allows record labels to have an incredibly detailed insight into where their artists are popular – right down to the town,” Musicmetric’s Chief Executive Gregory Mead tells Billboard. “Although the file-sharing numbers may be high, it will be possible to translate many of these into buyers.”
Beyonce has sold 991,000 copies in its first 10 days, earning it the top spot on the Billboard 200 chart for two consecutive weeks.
Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio
