It has been revealed that Beyoncé’s new self-titled album has already been illegally downloaded over 240,000 times, costing the singer around $3.8 million.

The album first premièred on iTunes at the beginning of the month, much to the surprise of fans but quickly became the music retailer’s fastest selling album ever amassing sales of one million in just three days.

Since then MusicMetric have revealed that Beyoncé’s entire back catalogue has been shared over 2 million times with a huge proportion of that number being of her new album.

They calculated that if each album has a retail value of $15.99, B has potentially lost $3.8 million in revenue.

MusicMetric Chief Executive Gregory Mead said: "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.

"Although the file-sharing numbers may be high, it will be possible to translate many of these into buyers."