Last year, Australian artists experienced a blockbuster sales year that resulted in no less than 14 Aussie albums hitting #1 on the ARIA Charts.

But while local artists proved popular with the music-buying public, they’ve proven to be just as popular with online pirates.

The likes of Flume, Boy & Bear, and the legendary Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds were not only among the highest selling albums of 2013 but also the most illegally downloaded on multiple torrenting websites, according to new research from Music Rights Australia.

The creative rights lobby group gathered data from the top five illegal file sharing websites and specifically looked for Australian music-makers that had earned a #1 record on the ARIA Albums Chart from 2013 to today, as The Music Network reports.

Tracking the shares and downloads on the likes of The Pirate Bay and Torrent Reactor, the resulting infographic (pictured below) reveals an intriguing list of 14 Australian #1 albums.

Topping the results as the most pirated Aussie act? That’d be INXS, who saw 8 albums re-enter the charts following the airing of Never Tear Us Apart: The INXS Story giving a major boost to the internationally renowned rockers’ profile.

Two variations of the INXS: The Very Best compilations occupied the #1 and #2 positions of the ARIA Charts in the weeks following the two-part tele-movie chronicling the rise of the band and the eventual fall of frontman Michael Hutchence, and the band also dominate the lion’s share of pirated #1 Aussie albums, breaking over 200 shared torrents on BitSnoop.com.


(Image: Music Rights Australia. Source: The Music Network)

The next most popular act with the pirate community is Keith Urban. The Aussie-bred country star, who was among the Top 10 highest paid Aussies in 2013, and his US Billboardtopping album Fuse follow behind INXS but in front of the Push The Sky Away, the first-ever #1 record from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds.

The veteran band’s critically acclaimed 15th studio album was also voted as the #1 Aussie album of 2013 by Tone Deaf readers, with indie electro trio RÜFÜS coming second place with their debut album Atlas – another ARIA chart-topper that appears in grate number on the most pirated list.

The news may come as great dismay to RÜFÜS, who are embarking on a nation-wide tour this May/June, their last Australian shows before decamping to Berlin to record a new album, though given the named torrenting sites are mainly international, it does prove the trio’s large international appeal (where they now go by RÜFÜS DU SOL). …alarming research found that Australia was the worst downloader of illegal music than anywhere else in the world.

Other widely downloaded #1 albums come from the Ian Kenny-fronted Karnivool (the ARIA-winning Asymmetryand Birds Of Tokyo’s March Fires (the most played act on radio in 2013), along with Bliss N Eso’s Circus In The Sky, Bernard Fanning’s DeparturesBoy & Bear’s Harlequin Dreamand the eponymous debut LP from Flume, the highest selling Aussie album of 2013.

Interestingly, beating them all in the illegal download stakes is Zion by contemporary Christian group Hillsong United, showing either that church-going pirates don’t mind skipping over the ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’ part of the bible (or that maybe online atheists have taken their antagonism to new secular extremes).

Similar studies into music piracy have previously shown that the likes of Daft Punk, Katy Perry, Bruno Mars, and Jay Z were among the most illegally downloaded artists of last year, while alarming research from 2012 found that Australia was the worst downloader of illegal music per capita than anywhere else in the world.

The copyright infringement issue has grown large enough for the Australian Government to step in. Last month, Attorney-General George Brandis sought to introduce a ‘three-strikes-policy’ to crackdown on illegal downloaders, but search engine titans Google have warned against the proposal in an attempt to shut down the proposal, as The Music Network reports.

The push comes as the most recent ARIA reports show that Australian music sales suffered the worst decline ever – a dip of 12% in 2013 – while long-term, the Aussie music industry has almost halved in value over a decade, making the correlation between the popularity of music with the public and pirates harder to ignore.

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