Aug 26, 2016 After much anticipation, Frank Ocean's album,Blondehas finally arrived and people are understandably pumped. Since the self-released record, which followed a surprise 45-minute visual album — Endless – dropped on Saturday, it has been a huge hit. However, because the album is currently anApple Music exclusive, die-hard users of popular streaming services like Spotify are seeking out alternate methods to get their Blonde fix. So far, the album has been illegally downloaded more than 750,000 times. No big deal or anything. Data released to Music Business Worldwide(MBW) by MUSO — a data-analytics and ‘piracy audience reconnection’ specialist — shows that as of midday UK time on Aug. 25, Ocean's album had been illegally downloaded 753,849 times. In case that number wasn't impressive enough, according to MBW, MUSO's data only reflects illegal downloads of the album as a whole, not single track downloads or any illegal streams. This means the true number of illegal downloads and listens is probably significantly higher. A study by MUSO revealed that in May 2016, illegal streaming sites had become the most popular form of piracy in the world, and as more and more albums are being released exclusively, like Kanye West's Life of Pablo, these high piracy rates will likely continue http://mashable.com/2016/08/26/frank-ocean-blonde-illegal-downloads/#2qWjoUchNqqR
Aug 27, 2016 Considered the fact some of the torrents or regular download links with the album were concealed under the fake names, they will never get to the actual number. It's still pretty high amount tho.
Aug 27, 2016 cheap f---s. complain about no new music from him for 3+ years and can't even support it
Aug 27, 2016 Agree, and the company that collected that data is pretty upfront about that. The 750k dl's are direct downloads of the entire album from torrents and other file-sharing sites across the web. They seem pretty serious about their services lol
Aug 27, 2016 this is the company that collects this data https://www.muso.com/market-analytics/ they're site is pretty broad but it talks about monetizing this huge demand for piracy lol it supposedly works with many major distributors but again it's pretty broad
Aug 27, 2016 but thats incredibly hard to track, i mean I'm sure that the real number of downloads is much higher than that. It would be really hard for them to know about some of the obscure file sharing services that may have uploaded the album. probably a lot of private sites too.
Aug 27, 2016 sure. they dont get really in depth about their "indispensible market analytics tool" on their website, the most they say is that it calculates demand across "all piracy delivery platforms" which they name as "web piracy, social media, P2P and search engines". either way that number is actual downloads but it as a bare minimum of the total downloads. still interesting to see the effect in numbers of illegal downloading
