Ed Sheeran’s + most pirated album in the UK

A new study by Musicmetric has revealed that Ed Sheeran’s + is the most pirated album in the UK.

The company, who monitor the global activity of BitTorrent files found that, during the first half of 2012, 43 million albums and singles were illegally downloaded in the UK. This means Britain is second only to the US, who topped the poll with 96,681,133 illegal music downloads for the same period.

Rizzle Kicks’ Stereo Typical is the second most illegally downloaded album in the UK, with Rihanna’s Talk That Talk in third place. Jessie J’s Who You Are and Olly Murs’ In Case You Didn’t Know also feature in the Top 5.

Manchester topped the poll for the most amount of illegal downloads per city or town (395,516) with Nottingham, Southampton, Liverpool and Sheffield making up the rest of the Top 5.

"According to their data, there are more illegal downloads in the UK still than there are legal purchases," Geoff Taylor, chief executive of The BPI, told the BBC. "[It] compares to about 240 million tracks that were sold legally. A lot of people are getting very rich from stealing other people's things. That's wrong, and we think that musicians deserve to be paid for what they do, just like everyone else."

The Top 20 most pirated albums in the UK are as follows:

According to the Official Charts Company’s sales data, the UK’s Top 20 biggest selling digital albums (ie; legally purchased) for that same period are as follows:

© 2012 The Official Charts Company. All rights reserved.