Beyonce's self-titled album has sold amazingly well since its release, but it also has been illegally downloaded plenty of times.
The album was downloaded 240,000 times in its first 10 days of being available, reports Rolling Stone. That number means that about $3.8 million in sales was lost, if every copy sold was priced at $15.99 and none who downloaded later went and purchased the album.
Musicmetric estimates that, during 2013, Beyonce albums were illegally downloaded close to two million times, with figures jumping after her latest album was released. "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, CEO Gregory Mead said.
Mead made sure to note, "Although the file-sharing numbers may be high, it will be possible to translate many of these into buyers."
The numbers follow on the reports that Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad were labeled the most pirated shows for the year. The fantasy epic's season three finale was downloaded 5.9 million times, with one million downloads occurring just a day after its airing on HBO.
Breaking Bad was right behind with 4.2 million downloaded and The Walking Dead was right behind with 3.6 million.
image: Wikimedia Commons
