Ed Sheeran is the most pirated artist in Bristol

Ed Sheeran has topped the list of most shared artists amongst Bristol's music pirates.

The singer and songwriter's latest album Plus was illegally downloaded in Bristol more often than any other album – 492 times per month.

Another popular artist in Bristol was Ben Howard.

An average of 2,6875 illegal downloads were tracked in Bristol each month – making it the 11th highest city in the UK in a league table of places where the most downloads take place.

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Manchester topped that list, followed by Nottingham, Southampton, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leicester, Stoke-on-Trent, Glasgow, Cardiff and Leeds.

The statistics just tracked a selection of current best-selling albums and do not represent all illegal downloads.

The data was compiled by monitors Musicmetric, who measured traffic across the Bittorrent network, widely used by music fans to share albums and songs, both legally and illegally.

They found that globally over 3 billion music tracks were downloaded in the first six months of this year.

Ed Sheeran topped the national chart of most pirated artist as well, followed by Rhianna and Frank Ocean.

More illegal shares were found to be taking place in the UK (43,263,582) than anywhere else in the world besides the US (96,681,133).

It comes as the Government continues its crackdown on illegal downloading - which has included restricting access to several sites used by pirates.

Internet freedom campaigners say the measures are draconian as many of the sites targeted are also used for legitimate sharing of non-copyrighted or public domain files.