Beyonce Has Already Lost $4 Million On Pirated Copies Of Her New Album

If you think streaming services like Spotify and Pandora have solved illegal downloading, take a look at the following chart pulled by Nina Ulloa at Digital Music News.

It shows the number of illegally downloaded copies of Beyonce's blockbuster eponymous visual album as tracked by research firm Musicmetric.

The album dropped Dec. 13 and sold about 1 million copies in its first week.

During the same period, it was illegally downloaded 240,000 times, including more than 55,000 times the day of its release, according to Ulloa and Musicmetric.

Chart:

At $16 a pop on iTunes, that means Beyonce lost about $4 million just that week alone. But the number has likely moved higher, as illegal downloads have continued at an average of about 20,000 a day.

Presumably, major artists now build in these charts into their pricing models. Still, it's a staggering amount of money to see fly out the window.