Beyonce's New Album Pirated 240,000 Times In Its First Week

Beyonce Knowles' visual album, "Beyonce", has become a big target of piracy. The 14-song and 17-music video set was illegally downloaded for 240,000 times in its first week. Available for $15.99, the album could have grossed another $3.8 million in sales. Music data analyst Musicmetric said that as of December 18, Beyonce's entire music catalog was shared more than 2 million times through file sharing site BitTorrent. Around 240,000 of those were shares of her new self-titled album.

"The usefulness of BitTorrent data is that it allows record labels to have an incredibly detailed insight into where their artists are popular - right down to the town," said Musicmetric's Chief Executive Gregory Mead. "Although the file-sharing numbers may be high, it will be possible to translate many of these into buyers." Beyonce's new album arrived unexpectedly on December 13 and sold 617,000 in its first three days. It is currently spending its second week at No. 1 on Billboard 200 after selling additional 374,000.