Bruno Mars had an amazing 2013. First his Unorthodox Jukebox album topped the domestic and international Billboard charts. Then his singles,”When I was Your Man,” “Locked Out of Heaven” and “Treasure” remained on top of the 100 single charts for months. Mars concluded his year by being named Billboard’s Artist of the Year.
In addition to all that success, his concerts sold out all across the United States, he won several major music awards, and he received multiple nominations for the 2014 Grammy Awards. As Mars leaves 2013 behind, he won one more music honor this week: most illegally downloaded artist of 2013.
According to London based data analysis firm, MusicMetric, Bruno Mar’s songs and album were downloaded 5.8 million times in 2013. Bit Torrent was the site MusicMetric used to gather its data for the study. Bit Torrent is the most popular peer-to-peer based file sharing program in the North America. It allows people to share programs, music and videos through downloads. MusicMetric focused on Bit Torrent’s traffic to form its data to analyze.
MusicMetric narrowed down their study to 20 artist who were downloaded the most in 2013 on Bit Torrent sites and programs. Besides Mars, others artists who topped this study include Rihanna, Justin Timberlake, Daft Punk and Flo Rida. The typical traffic breakdown of downloads for each artist were 70% of their total downloads came from people downloading full albums and 30% were from individual singles’ downloads.
Despite the huge numbers, Musicmetric claims that Bit Torrent’s downloading is at a steady decline due to the increasing availability of streaming music. According to Billboard,”BitTorrent’s share of total daily traffic in North America had fallen to 11.1% from 18.9% in the second half of 2011.”
Here’s how many downloads each of the top 20 most-downloaded artists of 2013 received, according to MusicMetric’s study:
1 Bruno Mars, 5,783,556
2 Rihanna, 5,414,166
3 Daft Punk, 4,212,361
4 Justin Timberlake, 3,930,185
5 Flo Rida, 3,470,825
6 Kanye West, 3,199,969
7 Eminem, 3,176,122
8 Jay Z, 3,171,358
9 Drake, 3,139,408
10 Pitbull, 3,138,308
11 One Direction, 2,920,445
12 Maroon 5, 2,857,652
13 Zedd, 2,828,764
14 Nicki Minaj, 2,681,177
15 Adele, 2,594,275
16 Avicii, 2,562,151
17 David Guetta, 2,441,235
18 Linkin Park, 2,352,385
19 Pharrell Williams, 2,336,996
20 Katy Perry, 2,318,740
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