The data suggests that Ed Sheeran - with his album + - is, so far this year, the most illegally downloaded artist in 459 of the 694 cities, towns and villages covered by the research.
In the first half of the year, over seven million files - mostly full albums - were downloaded illegally in the capital through peer-to-peer file sharing, says Musicmetric.
All of the top 10 towns and cities have a sizable student populations.
However, a strong student population does not necessarily lead to a large level of piracy.
Loughborough - which has a very large student population - does not rank so highly, clocking up a monthly average of just over 3,000 illegal music downloads, the data indicates.
The data also suggests that quality of broadband plays at least some role in how active an area is with piracy.
Cardiff aside, piracy rates in Wales - where speeds are slower - are low, even in well-populated areas. In Llanelli, for instance, only 1,581 illegal downloads are logged each month. But Yeovil, an area of similar population size with a faster average broadband speed, clocks up a monthly average of 4,259 downloads. And the people of Carlisle, ranked one of the worst places in the country for broadband speed, rack up fewer than 2,000 pirated downloads per month - despite a population of over 70,000.
For the music industry, Musicmetric's report makes difficult reading.
The nature of illegal downloading makes it extremely difficult to track its full extent, but the study's findings are fully conclusive in at least one regard: piracy remains a massive issue.
Even at a time when the music industry is doing more than ever to offer more legal ways to download music - with stores like iTunes and streaming services such as Spotify - these efforts are apparently so far doing little to quell the internet community's desire to not pay for its music.
"It shows that illegal downloading remains a significant problem," Geoff Taylor, chief executive of UK music industry body the BPI told BBC News.
"It is having a significant effect on investment in new music. That remains our serious concern."
Piracy continues to touch every inch of the industry.
"It's on session musicians who play in the studio; it's on the engineers and tape ops in the studio; it's on the guys working in a PR company trying to get coverage; it's on the marketing department; the guys in legal who are doing the contracts.
"We are losing hundreds of millions of pounds a year that should be getting invested into new music."
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