Australians download music illegally more frequently, by head of population, than any other country. At the same time we also happily pay for downloads and still buy physical albums at a rate which surprises the industry worldwide.

According to a survey of downloads from bit torrent sites conducted by Musicmetric, a self-described data and analytics company, Australia, with just over 19 million downloads, placed sixth in the top 10 for music downloads in the past year. The top downloading nation was the US which, according to Musicmetric, downloaded music 96,681,133 times, more than double the next nearest nation, Britain, which had a little over 43 million downloads.

Hilltop Hoods ... most popular artists downloaded in Australia.

However, by size, Australia with a population of 23 million for those 19 million downloads was comfortably the most frequent user of unofficial or illegal sites. And the most popular artist downloaded in Australia was Adelaide hip-hop group the Hilltop Hoods.

Dylan Liddy, manager of the Hilltop Hoods, was wary of accepting the Musicmetric figures but was relatively sanguine about the impact of illegal downloads on sales.