Domain: exvagos.com
Registration: Privacy Protection Service, Inc. (Australia)
Hosting Provider: Mir Telematiki Ltd. (Russia)
Registrar:  publicdomainregistry.com
Revenue Sources:  Advertising, pay-per-install of potential malware.

This site has been in operation for over 7 years and continues to remain popular as pre-release music can be directly downloaded from the site. There are currently over 88,475 music titles on the site, in comparison to 52,000 last year. The site used to be hosted from France by OVH Sarl, but in 2015 the site moved to a new hosting provider located in Russia, MIR TELEMATIKI. The site has a global Alexa ranking of 20,541 and a ranking of 498 in Spain (81.8% of the visitors to the site are from Spain). The site receives in excess of around 45,000 unique users per day.

The site has over a dozen music sections where users can upload and download infringing files. There are normally many links to cyberlockers from where the most popular albums and tracks can be downloaded. By providing multiple links the site ensures this material is always available for download. This site is clearly designed and operated to maximize its role as a distributor of infringing content, and is actively engaged in ensuring that content remains available.

In 2012, the Spanish music industry submitted a complaint to the IPC regarding this site. The case was closed in January 2014 as the site had removed the infringing links detailed in the complaint.

Domain: goear.com
Registration: Goear BV, Amsterdam, NL
Hosting Provider: Serverius Holding B.V. (Netherlands)
Registrar:  Hosting Concepts B.V.
Revenue Sources:  Advertising

Goear is an unlicensed streaming website hosted from Holland by Serverious Holding. The site offers hundreds of thousands of music files for users to stream and download. Currently the site has more than 450,000 files available (approx. 50,000 more than last year). The site is very important for both Spanish and Latin American users, but even more so for Latin America in 2015 following the closure of Grooveshark in May 2015. According to Alexa, the site has a global ranking of 33,852 and ranks 3,744 in Spain, (16.9% of the visitors to the site are in Spain). The site receives in excess of 50,000 unique users per day.

Many of the pages on the site display advertising banners which generate revenue for the site. Goear also uses social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Previously an Android app for the site was available on the Google Play store but this was removed on referral to Google. However, the iOS app remains available on the Apple store.

To use the website, a user simply needs to type in the artist or album name they want to listen to in the search box following which they are redirected to a page from where they can stream the track. Rights holders have submitted take down requests but any action taken is ineffective and slow.
As with Bajui, in 2012 the Spanish music industry submitted a complaint to the IPC regarding this site. In 2013, the IPC held that the site had infringed the intellectual property in 10 albums. Goear’s lawyer filed an appeal at the National High Court regarding the IPC’s decision to end the administrative procedure.  The National High Court dismissed the appeal and the Supreme Court has recently disqualified this case. In parallel, in March 2014, the Central Administrative Court issued a decision refusing to allow the ISP for the website Goear.com to suspend its service to the site. The judge held that such disruption to the site was not proportionate as the IPC had only demonstrated that 34 out of the 6,833 files were still on the site following the previous administrative decision. AGEDI subsequently appealed the decision before the Appeal Central Court of Administrative Litigation and the appeal was upheld. In January 2015, the Madrid High court found that the site was liable for direct copyright infringements and that it could not benefit from safe harbour protection under the E-Commerce law.

On 7 September 2015, the IPC requested that the site remove approximately 100,000 URLs. The site has posted the letter they received to their site. In the event of non-compliance with the removal order, the relevant internet service providers will be required to suspend access to the site.

Domain: bajui.com
Registration: Whois Privacy Protection Service, Inc., Kirkland, WA (US)
Hosting Provider: ITL Company (Ukraine)
Registrar: eNom, Inc.
Revenue Sources:  Advertising

Bajui is part of grupoet.com, which operates unlicensed services including music, movies, series and pornography. The site has been popular for the last 6 years and pre-release music can be downloaded directly from the site. There are currently over 37,745 music titles on the site. The site is supported by revenue generated by advertising on the site. According to Alexa, this website has a global ranking of 22,626 and ranks 550 in Spain (65.7% of the visitors to the site are from Spain). The site receives in excess of 54,000 unique users per day (over 120,000 page views).

There are typically many links to cyberlockers from where the most popular albums and tracks can be downloaded. It is also appears that 6 to 7 users are uploading most of the links. The site appears to monitor the status of links, as once links are removed from cyberlockers they are replaced with new ones, ensuring the material is always available to download.

The album art is also available on the site. This site is clearly designed and operated to maximize its role as a distributor of infringing content, and is actively engaged in ensuring that content remains available. While there are mechanisms for securing takedowns of specific links, that is an inadequate and ineffective “remedy” for a site that is engaged in wilful distribution of known infringing materials.

The Law on Sustainable Economy (“Sinde Law”) came into effect in Spain on 1 March 2012. The Sinde law provides for an expedited procedure for the removal of illegal content from websites or for blocking access to illegal services. The Spanish music industry (Promusicae) submitted a complaint to the Intellectual Property Commission (“IPC”) regarding this site but the case was closed last year as the specific links included in the complaint had been removed from the site.

Domain: israbox.info, (formerly israbox.com, israbox.org, israbox.net)
Registration: Robert Cheshir, IsraBox LTD, Stockholm, Sweden
Hosting Provider: Portlane Ab (Sweden)
Registrars:  PublicDomainRegistry.com; Regtime ltd; Go Canada Domains LLC
Revenue Sources:  Advertising, malware install programs, revenue sharing with redirects to third party sites.

Israbox provides users with download access to a broad range of commercially available music. The homepage lists the Top Albums and also notes “you can download free music albums. We present new items of music and the hot hits for information.”  On the homepage, the user is presented with details regarding various albums including artist name, album title, year of release, record label, genre, and quality of the download, total time and total size of the file. The site organizes content behind menu tabs for Rock, Pop, Folk, Country, Soul and other genres making it easy for users to browse through offerings.  The site also provides search capability to to take users to specific artists or titles.  The files themselves are stored on various cyberlocker sites and upon chosing material to download, the user is redirected to the download page of a locker site.

Israbox has a current global Alexa ranking of 7,825.  SimilarWeb traffic data shows the site averaging 5.6 million visits a month.

Domain: Albumkings.co (formerly albumkings.net)
Registration: Ivan Ivanov, Moscow, Russia
Hosting Provider:  THORDC-AS THOR Data Center, Iceland
Registrar:  eNom, Inc.; TLD Registrar Solutions Ltd.
Revenue Sources:  Advertising, malware install programs, revenue sharing with popunder redirects to third party sites, and likely revenue sharing with cyberlocker sites where files are hosted.

Albumkings is a site that provides unauthorized access to thousands of full albums and tens of thousands of individual tracks for free streaming and downloading.  The site does not host the content, rather the operators upload content to various cyberlockers around the world.  When particular files are removed from the locker services pursuant to DMCA notices,  popular files are immediately re-uploaded to ensure they remain available through the Albumkings website.  The site ensures that  every popular new release is available.  The site neatly organizes albums by genre offering access to large libraries of R&B, Rap, Country, Rock, Pop music.  The site also offers a section on upcoming releases and advising users of the official release date along with a prediction of when the new album will be available on the site.

The site has huge user base with a global Alexa ranking of 33,159.  SimilarWeb data shows that the site is attracting in excess of 3 million visits a month, with 52% of that traffic coming from the U.S.

Domain: im1music.co
Registration: Whois Privacy Protection Service, Inc., Kirkland, WA (US)
Hosting Provider:  Delta Softmedia Ltd (Bulgaria)
Registrar:  eNom, Inc.
Revenue Sources:  Advertising, malware install programs, revenue sharing with redirects to third party sites.

This is a new service in the audiocastle, viperial family of infringing sites.  It offers the same services and same content from the same sources as its sister sites.  The new im1music site already has a global Alexa ranking of 51,735 and SimilarWeb is reporting the site is averaging 1.1 million site visits a month.

Domain: stafaband.info (formerly audiocastle.net, audiocastle.co)
Registration: Whois Privacy Protection Service, Inc., Kirkland, WA (US)
Hosting Provider:  Delta Softmedia Ltd (Bulgaria)
Registrar:  eNom, Inc.
Revenue Sources:  Advertising, malware install programs, revenue sharing with redirects to third party sites.

Audiocastle characterizes itself as an urban music site that is updated daily with the hottest urban music, videos, and albums. The home page also provides a telling disclaimer that states “We do not claim any of the materials that we upload and any copyright infringement complaints will be executed immediately! It is our policy to honor all take-down requests!”  The operators acknowledge that they upload the content and thus are direct infringers of copyrighted works.  Honoring takedown requests does not absolve them of liability.  Moreover, it is clear they simply don’t “honor” takedown notices as anything that is removed is simply reuploaded to ensure the files remain available through the site.  Until recently the operators of the site uploaded the infringing files to a hosting site Sharebeast.com.  When that site was seized by the Justice Department last month, and all of their files became unavailable, the site simply moved their files to a new service, dopefile.com to ensure that downloads would remain available to users.

The RIAA has sent the site over 50,000 infringing URLs for removal but files remain available.  The Google Transparency Report reveals that Google has removed just over 146,000 infringing audiocastle URLs from its search index.  The jumping from audiocastle.net to audiocastle.co and now audiocastle.me domain names is likely in response to Google’s demotion of the domain in search results.  Each time one of their domains is demoted from the top search results, the site is able to quickly reappear in the top search results simply by registering audiocastle with a new top level domain.

Audiocastle has a global Alexa ranking of 23,449.   According to SimilarWeb traffic data, the site is averaging 7 million visits a month with 55% of that traffic coming from the United States.

Domain: stafaband.info
Registration: Fatra Dhinata, Exez Entertainment, Bandung, Jawa Barat, Indonesia
Operator: Fatra Dhinata, Exez Entertainment (Indonesia)
Hosting Provider:  LeaseWeb USA (US)
Revenue Sources:  Advertising, malware install programs

Stafaband is an unlicensed service providing free on-demand streaming and downloads of a vast catalogue of popular music. On its home page it welcomes users and boasts “On this website you can download free music, play and listen audio songs for free and no Registration!”  The site’s home page offers all of the latest albums under a section entitled “new albums 2015” using the official album art, and provides preset playlists under such categories  as  “Best Rock” organized by decade going back to the 50’s, and “Best Country.”  The site purports to respect copyright laws, and offers an email address for reporting infringing links.  However, active links are always available to the vast array of offerings, despite the fact that the RIAA alone has notified the site of nearly 200,000 infringing URLs and the Google Transparency Report shows that copyright owners have sought the removal of just over 3.7 million infringing URLs.  After touting itself as a source for free music in its banner headline, the site disingenuously advises users behind an inconspicuous “disclaimer” tab that users should delete files from their computer after listening, warning that if they don’t delete them “you’ll break copyright protection laws.”  Despite this, it knowingly offers not only currently released, popular music but also albums that have not yet been commercially released (i.e. pre-release music).

Stafaband has a global Alexa ranking of 10,311.  According to SimilarWeb traffic data, the site is averaging 7.4 million visits a month with the majority of traffic coming from Indonesia and the United States.   Stafaband has been blocked in the U.K. by court order.

Domain: Itemvn.com
Registration: Domains By Proxy (US)
Operator: Nguyen Bui, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Hosting Provider:  M247 Ltd, (Romania)
Registrar:  GoDaddy.com, LLC
Revenue Sources:  Advertising, malware install programs, and revenue sharing with popunder redirects to third party sites.

Itemvn is an unlicensed music service that makes an enormous catalogue of popular music available for free streaming and download.   The site is entirely in English and there are thousands of albums and tens of thousands of individual tracks available to users.  In addition to a general search capability, the site neatly organizes albums under categories like “Most Popular,” “Hot Artists,” “Billboard Hot 100.”  The albums and singles are presented along with other materials like the official album art and song lyrics. Unlike many other download sites of this nature, itemvn hosts the content itself.  While the site purports to allow users to upload content, the most popular files are tagged as uploaded by itemvn itself.  Itemvn has a global Alexa ranking of 30,057.  SimilarWeb traffic data show the sites averages 5.4 million visits a month with 40% of that traffic coming from the United States. The site does not provide any data on how many downloads are taking place, but it does provide streaming counts.  One popular track is shown as having been streamed more than 700,000 times

Known to be one of the largest music sharing sites, MyFreeMP3 has little to no competition in the way that it provides music for its dedicated users. Beginning with the easy methods of finding music and up to selecting your music by the genre, the site has a huge database of tracks while even smaller sites will at times redirect you to this giant site to download your music.
Functionality
Similar to the look of a search engine, the site provides very easy searching for tracks artists, while it further allows to categorize between Artists, Charts, and Genres. The Artists category takes you to the large database of artists and bands available in an alphabetical selection, the genres page allows to easily classify music for any distinguishable user, while the charts page is currently unavailable. Having a Genres category ultimately increases efficiency in finding new music, especially for users who base their music findings on the genre they prefer, allowing them to even play the track before downloading it simply through the click of a button. The play bar automatically comes to life at the top of the site, allowing to switch tracks, change volume, and even skip to parts of the track, which makes it very easy to discover music. Each search result further displays the tracks in a very simple manner through a single long bar that also provides information like the bitrate and the song size, as well as the download button without the need to actually click on the resulting name. Each artist or band result also provides biographic information regarding the said artist or band, making this site even more beautiful and easy to get used to.
Design and Suggestions
One of the most appealing designs out there is the one of MyFreeMP3, starting with the calm looking theme that only works to suit the visitors’ needs. It is one of the few sites I have come across that is equipped with such a degree of functionality and design, not to mention the useful play bar for each single song that the user might want to try out. I would only suggest to fix the charts page and give it good functionality by providing charts for different genres and world regions.

RNBXclusive is a popular site for music sharing and was visited by millions of monthly users before its .com domain was seized. This was due to the accusations that the site used hackers to gain content by penetrating artists’ emails and websites. The site remains one of the most viewed for RnB fans as well as fans of similar music tastes. The new domain rnbxclusive.se now stands tall and offers free music to anyone; including daily updates of tracks, albums, and discographies.
Functionality
A very impressive functionality for a site that provides free content. The categories offer easier movement throughout the site and some popular categories are exclusives and videos that provide new content as soon as it’s available. The categories on the right are recent posts and upcoming albums which help users quickly gain insight into the popular recent uploads that are one click away. The site is basically used by many loyal visitors that also contribute by advertising thus making the site very stable in its functionality. The download category takes you directly to categories of albums, mixtapes, tracks, and monthly tapes that you can download easily. Meanwhile the download steps are one of the fastest as the direct link is provided next to the song.
Design and Suggestions
One of the best designs around is RNBXclusive’s. The cool looking background offers a certain darker appeal that highly matches RnB style as well as similar genres. Combining the darker appeal with the dark blue color gives the site a very beautiful design while only the two colors dominate throughout the site. Furthermore, each post is attractively uploaded in a scrolling style, giving in a retro appeal. One small thing that hurts my eye a bit is the search bar’s placement and the fact that it is full-on white. I would recommend giving it a blackish color as well as moving it on the front of the site.

Mp3Truck is an album and audio file link aggregator of files available on the internet. The main page consists of links to albums with respective thumbnails linking to the album’s details page which consists of list of songs and artist details. Users can play songs on the album page or download them. Users can favorite songs or create playlists to play them at a later time. This site has been blocked in UK owing to court orders. The search results are simple with sort filters on bitrate, relevance, size and duration. Users can hide remixes from the search results. The bottom of the page shows the list of searches / songs other users are currently listening to. The site is not mobile friendly and you cannot search it when using mobile device.

Mp3Soup is a music search engine popular in UK. It lets the user search for songs and artists in its database. It doesnot host any files but only indexes links to audio files publicly available in the wild. Users can play, download or send the song as a ringtone to their mobile. They also have a listing of UK Top 100, US Top 100, canada top 10 and German top 10 lists. They follow DMCA for removal of copyrighted content in their index. They have been banned in UK following court orders. The results can be filtered based on duration, size, remix and quality. Registration is free and users can register to bookmark and create playlists

Mp3clan is one of the most popular mp3 search engines and audio file indexer in UK. All files are sorted according to artist and album and genres. The main page has a search box with list of categories and artists with top albums with a search box to search for songs and artists. You can even find playlists with the song in it. It allows you to create a ring tone and embed the files on you website along with usual feature of downloading and playing. User registration is not available so you cannot save / bookmark it on the site.  This site has been banned in UK owing to court orders.

http://fullsongs.net/ is a music search engine and link aggregator. Users can search for songs, lyrics and videos. Like other sites this site doesnot have a listing of albums and songs  explicitly. All the songs listed on their top 100 songs are just tags. They have a very simple interface where users can search for songs and add them to playlist to be played later. The site is founded in 2009 and now banned in UK based on court orders. Unlike other music sites there is no user registration available and users cannot save their playlists. They also have a mobile friendly website.

Bursalagu, a strange name for music site which a www audio file indexer ad search engine. It provides file search for songs and lyrics. It has the most simplest UI which screams that it is a search engine. You can also find lists of tags categorized into songs, albums, artists and music charts. They also provide a firefox search bar to make search through their archives easy. They also provide a general search plugin for any browser that support opensearch standards. This site is immensely popular with 2million likes on facebook and 12k followers on twitter. Due to this it has been banned in UK on grounds of copyrights on march 2015 according to Torrentfreak. They only have links to files and do not host them.  Their download system is a little complicated though. You have to first click on red button to check whether the file is available or not then click on the download button that appears after that!!

Plixid is a music release site that post file locker links to major / popular albums or songs. The whole site looks like a blog and all songs are categorized into metal, jazz, pop, indie and relevant sub categories and tagged with artists and album names. Each post has list of songs present in the file and links to a filelocker like uploaded.net or nova.com. They provide basic search functionality to discover artist, albums and songs. Due to their immense popularity they are blocked in UK owing to court orders in March 2015 as reported by torrentfreak.com. The site started operating in 2009 and still open.

Stafa Band is a audio file indexer and link aggregator  where you can search for you favorite artist’s work / song. The audio files are categorized according to artists, billboards, uk / us topcharts, alphabetical listing and monthly singles. They even provide search by artist and song title and lyrics for each song. This site started in 2007 and still going strong. Contrary to the current design trends, the site looks to be old fashioned yet user friendly. But it a little confusing to the visitor, and the search bar is hard to locate. This site is very popular in UK and has  been recently banned by various ISPs owing to court orders. They also have a chatbox at the end to shout out your hearts content 😛

New album releases is a release log / blog style release indexer. They post links to download albums from various file hosts like uploaded.to and oron. Total they have around 70000 albums lists and all albums are categorized according to artist and type. They are blocked in UK owing to court order. The search box on the top right corner provides a way to sift through all albums on the website. Newalbumreleases makes available a substantial library of newly-released popular music content, as well as albums not yet commercially released.  The site features the most recently uploaded albums on the home page using album artwork.  In addition it organizes earlier posts by genre under menu tabs for Rock, Pop, Metal, etc.  The home page also offers a search capability for content by artist or title.  The site hosts its content on cyberlockers and provides users with links to services like Rapidgator.net and Hitfile.net from where the files are available for download.  All of the files appear to have been uploaded to the cyberlocker sites by Newalbumreleases as the download files usually include “newalbumreleases” in the file name.  As the uploaders they are direct infringers and takedown notices to the site are ineffective.

The site has a global Alexa ranking of 7,517.  SimilarWeb traffic data shows the site averages 5.6 million visits a month.

This site has been blocked in the U.K. by court order.1

Mp3skull is a simple mp3 search engine and file indexer that indexes audio files over the wild. It organizes files according to artist, size and duration and album. They have an ultra simple search bar and spartan layout which lists top downloads on the front page and search results just lists the audios an function to listen to them. This site has been blocked in UK by isps owing to court order.  They have a firefox toolbar from which you can search on their website without even going into the website 😀

Domain: mp3skull.ninja (formerly mp3skull.com, mp3skull.to, mp3skull.cr, mp3skull.is)
Registration:  Monica Vasilenko, MP3Skull, Inc., Petrozavodsk, Russia
Hosting Provider: M247 (Romania) – through Cloudflare (US)
Registrars:  EasyDNS Technologies, Inc.; Tucows Domains, Inc.
Revenue Sources:  Advertising, malware install programs, revenue sharing with redirects to third party sites.

Mp3skull is an unlicensed service that provides unlimited free downloads and on-demand streaming of the most popular copyrighted sound recordings in the world.  Its sole purpose is to generate profit from the theft of music, and it makes no pretence about what it does or why it does it.  Virtually any commercial recording is available for free download or streaming through the site and its most popular offerings (“Top Downloads”) virtually mirror the Billboard Top 100 list.

Mp3skull is the most highly trafficked mp3 site of its kind in the world and the huge user base allows its operators to profit from advertisements on the site and from the distribution of adware and malware to its users. The site purports to be simply an index site for mp3s found elsewhere on the internet, but the site operates within a close web of loosely affiliated sites that provide the content for mp3skull.

For years the site operated from the domain name mp3skull.com, but has since jumped to mp3skull.to, mp3skull.cr and mp3skull.is.  All of these domains now resolve to mp3kull.ninja.

Since 2011, various copyright owners have sent notices on more than 3.3 million mp3skull webpages offering access to infringing files.  RIAA alone has sent the site takedown notices on 1.7 million URLs to no avail.

We suspect the reason mp3skull has been repeatedly jumping to new top level domains is to work around search engine demotion signals.  Major search engines now demote sites from search results based on the volume of infringement notices they receive for the site. Changing the top level domain name allows the site to bypass the demotion signal and reappear in the top search results.  Mp3 sites like mp3skull have relied heavily on search to drive traffic to their site.  The rapid movement between domain names makes it difficult to get a fix on Alexa rankings and traffic measures, but the mp3skull.is just a month ago had a global Alexa ranking of 7392, and SimilarWeb traffic data has the site averaging over 40 million visits a month.
In April of this year, several US record labels sued mp3skull in U.S. District Court in Miami seeking monetary damages and other relief.  The operators of mp3skull failed to answer the complaint and the plaintiffs are seeking a default judgement against the site.

Mp3skull has been blocked in the U.K. by court order.