US consumers bought twice as many albums in the first half of the year as they downloaded illegally through BitTorrent, according to a new report from musicmetric.

Music fans in the territory also paid for 698 million songs between January and June this year, while using BitTorrent to download 21.3 million tracks.

They downloaded 75.6 million albums from BitTorrent in the period but 150.5 million CDs and album downloads were sold in the U.S. during the same period, according to ...