The last three years have seen a slow rise in global music piracy, after a period of steady decline, according to a report from MUSO, a U.K. technology company. The platform has logged more than 15 billion visits to music piracy sites in 2022. Iran accounts for 15.05% of all piracy traffic picked up by MUSO, followed by India (10.29%), The United States (7%), and Russia (6%), Billboard reports. More than half of all the piracy in the United States takes place via stream-ripping, which relies on programs to get around YouTube’s copyright protection and convert audio into MP3s.

34 percent of music listeners between 16 and 24 years old use stream ripping apps or services to listen to music illegally, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry says in its annual report. The report also noted that 38 percent of the younger demographic had used illegal means of listening in the last month, […]

Composer Harold Arlen's estate filed a 148-page lawsuit against Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, alleging they have committed widespread piracy, accusing them of running a "massive piracy operation for the purpose of generating profits from their sales and streams of pirated recordings". The lawsuit claims that technology allowed increased bootlegging by musical pirates, and because of this […]