Business News

The ten most-read news stories on the CMU site in 2013

By | Published on Monday 6 January 2014

The Pirate Bay

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Looking back through the website stats for 2013, the ongoing saga of The Pirate Bay comes out as the dominant news story of the year, with four reports on the file-sharing service appearing in the top ten – fans of symmetry will be pleased to see they occupy the top two and bottom two positions.

In first place was a report on the owner of Pirate Bay proxy PirateSniper (one of many services enabling people to circumvent web-blocks against TPB) being visited by police and representatives of the Federation Against Copyright Theft at his home. The legalities of offering a proxy are something of a grey area, but he was nonetheless given a stern talking to.

Below that came news of TPB changing its top level domain to one based in Peru, just one of many such moves the website made in 2013, which ultimately saw it back where it started, using previously defunct .se and .org domain names.

Elsewhere, a chapter in the year’s most shocking music-related news story featured high in the list, an early report on the arrest of former Lostprophets frontman Ian Watkins for sexual offences against children. Last month, of course, Watkins was sentenced to 29 years in prison, after pleading guilty to many of the charges against him.

Also popular amongst readers in 2013 were articles on members of Joy Division being questioned by police during the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, Lana Del Rey’s ‘Tropico’ film, the (slow) progress of Tool’s next album, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs banning phone cameras from a gig in New York, and Harry Styles’ description of his perfect girl.

In CMU features, there was a late charge to check out our ten favourite artists of the year, who we announced in December. After that came a Festival Line-Up Update column announcing the launch of a London edition of the Electric Daisy Carnival festival, followed by our tips for navigating the 2013 Notting Hill Carnival, an Approved piece on emerging pop artist Altrego, and a playlist put together by producer Jon Hopkins.

The top ten most-read news stories in full:

01: Pirate Bay proxy operator visited by police
02: The Pirate Bay relocates domain to Peru
03: Peter Hook discusses being questioned during Yorkshire Ripper hunt
04: Harry Styles describes his perfect girl
05: Lostprophets’ Ian Watkins denied bail
06: Lana Del Rey hints at Tropico film, screens new video
07: Work on new Tool album continues to progress slowly
08: Gig phone camera ban? Yeah Yeah Yeah please
09: The Pirate Bay moves to Icelandic domain
10: The Pirate Bay drops artist promotion service

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