San Francisco: Two out of every five music recordings sold worldwide in 2001 were illegal copies, with China, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico leading the trend, a global recording industry trade group said on June 11.

Sales of pirate compact discs (CDs) alone rose to 950 million in 2001 from 640 million in 2000, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry reported.

With CDs and cassettes combined, the group said, 1.9 million bogus recordings flooded global markets in 2001, resulting in the two out of five figure.

In 2000, that ratio was one out of every five, the group reported.

According to the IFPI, music piracy accounted for some $ 4.3 billion in 2001. That was only a slight increase in value from $ 4.2 billion in 2000, because of "sharply falling prices of pirate CD-R discs," the organisation said.

The group said that illegal music sales now outnumber legal music sales in 25 countries, predominantly "developing markets".

The group called for a global crackdown on illegal CD copying.

"Tolerance of piracy fosters lawlessness and tax evasion," said IFPI member Rick Dobbis, who is also president of Sony Music International.

Dobbis said pirating CDs cuts off local record sellers from earnings of the legal distribution chain.

"Some of the hardest hit victims of this growing problem are local economies," he said in a statement accompanying IFPI's figures.

"Owners of local record stores, CD plant workers, marketing, promotion and distribution people, and workers from every aspect of the complex business of making and distributing music are all affected," he stated.

The industry group said CD pirating is now equally divided between "large-scale" operations and smaller garage-based producers.

According to the report, China tops the list of illegal sales, with 90 per cent of music sales being fake, followed by Indonesia (85 per cent), Russia (65 per cent), Mexico (60 per cent) and Brazil (55 per cent).

The IFPI said that South Asia "remains the hub of pirate CD manufacturing". Seven out of 10 illegal disks come from the region, the group reported.

In April, the London-based group reported that the global music market fell five per cent in value and saw a 6.5 per cent drop in unit sales in 2001. The IFPI argues that drop is due to pirating.

The IFPI is affiliated with the Recording Industry Association of America, the Washington-based trade group waging legal battles on behalf of the recording industry against Internet music sites.

The RIAA succeeded in shutting down the pioneering digital music-swapping site Napster in 2001 on charges of wholesale copyright infringement.

The recording industry and Hollywood have been waging a largely futile fight to stop piracy. That battle has been made extremely difficult with the advent of digital media, which allows someone with a simple computer to make pristine copies of CDs and now DVDs.