People love buying Beyoncé's new self-titled fifth studio album. Released by total surprise on Friday, Dec. 13, the album has sold over 991,000 copies to date and is looking forward to a third week on top of the Billboard 200. However, for as much as people love buying music, they also love getting it for free, and according to Billboard.biz, Beyoncé is one hot illegally downloaded set.
Billboard reports that Beyoncé has been illegally downloaded on BitTorrent over 239,000 times.
Musicmetric tracked the file sharing service BitTorrent, who noted that Beyoncé's entire catalogue has been illegally shared and downloaded over 2 million times in 2013. Her new album accounts for roughly five percent of those shares, clocking in with 239,131 BitTorrent downloads.
Had fans actually purchased Beyoncé (and who knows how many of them would have), as $15.99 per iTunes download, the illegal shared have cost the "Drunk in Love" songstress and her label over $3.82 million in revenue.
Of course, Queen Bey shouldn't be sweating her album sales. With just 16 days on the charts, Beyoncé has already become one of the best-selling albums of the year, proving that the element of surprise and positive reviews can drive album sales with little difficulty.
Additionally, Beyoncé is projected to spend a third week on top of the Billboard 200, selling over 250,000 copies this week. Those sales figures alone match Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus' opening sales week and easily surpass the number of illegal downloads.
