What is the most pirated album of all time?
No matter how many campaigns the music industry launches to warn against the dangers of home taping, or how ‘you wouldn’t steal a car’, music piracy persists, satisfying the needs of many a listener on the musical high seas, much to the chagrin of the industry and artists alike.
It’s easy to think of music piracy as a modern invention, ushered in by the internet age and murky sites full of pop-up ads and an abundance of underscores. In actuality, music piracy has been around – in one form or another – for hundreds of years. Whether it was the unauthorised publication of sheet music, homemade phonograph discs, or bootleg cassette tapes, enterprising music fans have always found a way around paying full price for their listening habits.
Still, that is not to say that music piracy has always been the sole preserve of cheapskates and the internet-savvy. Arguably, the golden age of pirated music came from necessity. During the peak of the Cold War, Western music was placed under heavy restrictions behind the Iron Curtain, causing a necessity for music fans to pirate, bootleg, and smuggle records and reel-to-reel tapes of The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin into the Soviet Union by nefarious means.
Piracy or not, it’s difficult to imagine any of those artists having any major problems with their work being so beloved across the globe that people were willing to risk their freedom to hear it.
Following on from the age of bootleg LPs and home-dubbed cassette tapes, though, the advent of the internet birthed a new age of music piracy. All of a sudden, downloading all your favourite tracks for free was as easy as a few clicks, with no need to go down to your local market and buy slightly off-looking CDs from the boot of a shady man’s Ford Mondeo, you could sail the seas of piracy from the comfort of your own bedroom or internet cafe.
Inevitably, artists and industry executives were a lot more worried about the emergence of internet piracy, and sites like Napster or Pirate Bay, than they were a few homemade live recordings or lo-fi cassette tapes being flogged between friends. Famously, in fact, Metallica went after users of Napster back in the year 2000 for illegally sharing their music, culminating in a lengthy lawsuit against the piracy platform. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, though, piracy still persisted in the wake of that lawsuit.
So, what is the most pirated album of all time?
Given the fact that pirated music is, by its very nature, not regulated or chronicled by any official bodies – in other words, there is no ‘Top 40’ chart of pirated records – the most pirated album of all time is certainly up for debate. While the likes of The Beatles and Bob Dylan boast some of the most popular bootleg albums ever to grace record store shelves, internet piracy tends to account for much larger numbers.
One particularly popular example of album piracy came with Kanye West’s 2016 album The Life of Pablo. Originally, the rapper declared that the album would only be released through Tidal, but it quickly found its way onto Pirate Bay, where it was pirated half a million times in only two days following its release. What’s more, that particular album soon gave way to a deluge of bootleg CDs and vinyl records, too, which certainly puts it up there in the rankings of the most pirated albums.
Meanwhile, Pirate Bay’s rankings of most-downloaded albums is topped by the potentially unexpected 2014 album V by pop-rock stalwarts Maroon 5. Without wishing to cast aspersions, perhaps people were simply too proud to publicly spend money on the sounds of Adam Levine.
According to veteran pirating site ExtraTorrent, though, the most downloaded record on their site is Drake’s 2013 record Nothing Was The Same, with audiences seemingly unwilling to fork out for an official digital download of ‘Hold On, We’re Going Home’. Whichever of these albums holds the ultimate crown of being the most pirated album of all time, it seems unlikely that any of the artists involved are overly pleased with being in the running for that accolade.
