It’s no secret that the RIAA is on a mission to shut down piracy across the board. They have stepped up efforts in this campaign since 2011 when the music industry began taken huge hits. As they scour through the biggest search engine our generation has seen, Google, the RIAA is shutting down illegal URL’s left and right. During the next couple of days, RIAA plans to issue orders to take down the 10,000,000th URL from Google’s database.

In the next few hours Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI – together the four largest member labels of the RIAA – will ask Google to remove the10,000,000th allegedly infringing URL on their behalf.

The first RIAA takedown request listed publicly by Google took place on May 26, 2011 but it took until July 25, 2011 for the takedown numbers to really start adding up. During the week that followed a record 12,447 URLs were filed by the RIAA. By Nov 7 that same year takedowns had reached more than 30,000 URLs per week but it wasn’t until around 10 months ago that the music group really put its foot on the gas.

By the end of April 2012 the RIAA was asking for more than 200,000 URLs to be delisted every week, a level it largely maintained for the following four months. Then in August 2012 the labels opened the floodgates reaching more than 666,000 removal requests in a single week. While requests numbers have been diminishing ever since the numbers are still impressive, amounting to more than 1.7 million last month.

Props to Torrent Freaks & AlLindstrom