Results of a study have emerged today for the amount of illegal music downloads in the UK. The results are split up into cities. It seems Manchester has come out top, for the area which downloads music illegally most. A whopping 1.3 million tracks were reported in the city alone. The digital music analysts Musicmetric has been measuring the downloads through BitTorrent downloads. Reports suggest that a high percentage of these would be illegal.

There has been a lot of talk about illegal music download methods lately and it seems the authorities and service providers are clamping down on such activities. Virgin Media, Sky and BT got ordered earlier this year to block file sharing site Pirate Bay.

Reports on the news earlier today said that downloads are being watched and that anyone attempting to download music illegally could just be a 'click away from court'. However will people take this seriously? In todays society many people see free music downloads something that isn't much of a big deal.

Ed Sheeran's album is the most illegally downloaded album, reports say that his album is getting downloaded at a rate of 50,000 plus a month. Ed Sheeran talked to the BBC about this but surprisingly didn't seem to bothered. Ed shrugged it off saying that its all relative and suggested that people may still come and pay to see him live after not paying for his download.

Many argue that why they should buy music when they can get it free. Others say that they simply cannot afford it in the tough economic times. Perhaps its a financial issue as it seems that the North of the UK seems to be more active on illegal downloads. This suggesting that there is less money available in such area.

Here are the figures for illegal downloads for cities for the first part of this year

Manchester (1,317,012)

Liverpool (927,535)

Sheffield (748,301)

Nottingham (598,621)

Leicester (487,406)

Southampton (480,151)

Stoke-on-Trent (380,872)

Glasgow (1,037,934)

Cardiff (348,603)

Leeds (566,589)

What are your thoughts on this?

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