Piracy continued to rise globally in 2023 across all content categories. The largest relative increase was visible in the music and software categories, which saw double-digit growth. In the publishing category, manga comics dominate with the United States the leading source of traffic. Surprisingly, most music pirates come from Iran today.
Despite the growing availability of legal options, online piracy remains rampant. Every day pirate sites and services are used by millions of people worldwide.
New data released by UK-based piracy tracking company MUSO shows that pirate sites remain very relevant. And people have no trouble finding them either.
A few weeks ago it was revealed that video piracy continued to grow in 2023. A new report shows this uptrend is visible across all other content categories, reaching 229 billion platform visits in 2023, a 6.7% increase compared to a year earlier.
Music and software piracy are by far the smallest categories, but these saw the largest relative piracy increases. The number of visits to music and software piracy sites grew 13.4% and 14.1% respectively over the past year.
TV piracy remains the most popular among consumers, however, accounting for almost half of all piracy traffic with 103.9 billion visits in 2023. The publishing category takes second place with 63.6 billion visits, followed by 29.6 billion film piracy visits.