Suffolk music sensation Ed Sheeran's debut release is the year's most pirated album so far, according to a music industry report.

The Brit Award winner's album, called +, tops a list of recordings illegally downloaded from 'torrent' websites, in which fragments of electronic files are accessed from numerous sites and then assembled.

The figures suggest that 33.5m albums and 9.5m singles were accessed in the UK from the BitTorrent website during the first half of 2012. That compares with 43.6m albums sold legally - either as downloads or physically - during the same period, and 93.6m singles.

The research by global analysts Musicmetric is claimed to be the most in-depth study of the digital music industry.