Kisass.to recently shared the most popular torrent search terms of 2013, in what TorrentFreak reports as the 'BitTorrent Zeitgeist 2013'. Being one of the leading torrent sites in terms of visitors, the list is built from millions of searches and gives a pretty good idea of what users searched for on torrent search engines during 2013.
Topping the chart is YIFY, a movie release group pioneering torrent distribution of the latest movies. Though YIFY has its own Torrent site, their publications are also popular on other BitTorrent sites such as 1337x, The Pirate Bay and of course Kisass.to, as dedicated followers use the ‘YIFY’ tags to search for new torrents.
"I personally think that many people are following and downloading YIFY encodes due to the consistency we offer in our releasing. Everything from the consistent film cover art, to the information layout, and ultimately to the file-size of our encodes," YIFY’s founder said in explanation of the group's popularity, according to the International Business Times.
Film and TV
Bearing in mind that the list will be different for each torrent site, completing the top three of the BitTorrent Zeitgeist are movies World War Z and Iron Man 3. Other movies which made top 10 include; Man of Steel, Star Trek Into Darkness and Now You See Me. Popular TV series sought after by users include; Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and Dexter. Further down the list we also see shows such as The Walking Dead and Suits.
Music popularity lists
Expanding upon the video popularity lists we received a Musicmetric press release via email today, detailing the top 20 artists ranked by BitTorrent download volumes during 2013. Musicmetric, a London and LA-based trend analytics company, was created by London’s Imperial College graduates four years ago and its results are widely used to help record labels to target marketing campaigns.
Top music downloads include; Bruno Mars topping the chart with 5,783,556 downloads, Rihanna closely behind at 5,414,166 downloads and Daft Punk in third place with 4,212,361 downloads.
The full top 20 music download list is as follows:
|
Rank |
Name |
# Downloads |
|
1 |
Bruno Mars |
5783556 |
|
2 |
Rihanna |
5414166 |
|
3 |
Daft Punk |
4212361 |
|
4 |
Justin Timberlake |
3930185 |
|
5 |
Flo Rida |
3470825 |
|
6 |
Kanye West |
3199969 |
|
7 |
Eminem |
3176122 |
|
8 |
Jay Z |
3171358 |
|
9 |
Drake |
3139408 |
|
10 |
Pitbull |
3138308 |
|
11 |
One Direction |
2920445 |
|
12 |
Maroon 5 |
2857652 |
|
13 |
Zedd |
2828764 |
|
14 |
Nicki Minaj |
2681177 |
|
15 |
Adele |
2594275 |
|
16 |
Avicii |
2562151 |
|
17 |
David Guetta |
2441235 |
|
18 |
Linkin Park |
2342385 |
|
19 |
Pharrell Williams |
2336996 |
|
20 |
Katy Perry |
2318740 |
Gregory Mead of Musicmetric said: "Following the closure of many local HMV stores and the dwindling number of independent record shops, you simply cannot by physical records locally any more. This, combined with faster internet connections and people’s changing social habits, means more and more people engage with music online."
Although Torrent downloads do not necessary correlate with money making sales for record labels and artists, "The usefulness of Bit Torrent 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."
Incidentally, despite previous reports, Musicmetric never advised Iron Maiden to tour countries where their music was heavily pirated with reference to torrent download data.
