UK stream ripping increases 1390% in 3 years with stream ripping sites now accounting for 80.2% of the 50 most popular music only infringing piracy sites. PRS for Music commissioned a study, ‘Stream-ripping: its role in the UK music piracy landscape three years on’, to look at trends in this particular form of music piracy. The study was conducted by INCOPRO who estimated use in the UK of a sample of 100 of the most popular stream-ripping services from their database of over 17,000 piracy sites.
Websites promoting stream-ripping services increased 12% since the original 2016 study. Within the top 50, there was a notable drop in the proportion of BitTorrent sites, decreasing from 14 to six. This is likely due to increased geo-blocking and enforcement efforts from the wider music industry.
YouTube remains the legitimate service most exploited by stream-ripping, with 70 of the 100 services surveyed exclusively offering ‘YouTube ripping’. Spotify is now the second most affected service, overtaking SoundCloud since the 2016 research. Deezer, Amazon Music and Tidal were amongst other popular licensed platforms most targeted.
Of 60 stream-ripping services analysed to determine server locations and hosting providers, over half (32) were found to be based in the US. This number may be misleading however, as 25 of the services use the content delivery network CloudFlare, which could mask their true hosting provider’s location, leading to additional challenges for copyright infringement notifications.
Advertising is still found to be the main source of funding for stream-ripping services. Categories of advertising found on these sites included generic/other (52%), scams (34%) and malware/Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs) (14%), with many in the generic/other category likely unaware that they are being associated with pirated content alongside other potentially harmful advertisements.
The full report (34pp) is freely available and can be downloaded here.
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