BRIT award-winning Suffolk star Ed Sheeran’s debut release is the year’s most pirated album so far, a report has claimed.
His album, called +, tops a list of recordings illegally downloaded from websites, in which fragments of electronic files are accessed from numerous sites and then assembled.
The figures – released by research by global analysts Musicmetric – suggest 33.5 million albums and 9.5 million singles were accessed illegally in the UK from the internet during the first half of 2012. That compares with 43.6 million albums sold legally during the same period.
Sheeran, from Framlingham, told the BBC: “There’s a decent balance between – you can live off your sales and you can allow people to illegally download it and come to your gigs.”
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