Last year Ed Sheeran hit the headlines when it was revealed his album had been illegally downloaded millions of times. The artist took the news completely in his stride and now he’s back again, suggesting he might be the one to get the ball rolling the next time.

In September 2012, Musicmetric published their Digital Music Index, a report on the state of online piracy.

Amongst dozens of stats it was revealed that English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran’s music had been downloaded in the UK more than any other artist. At the time Sheeran had sold 1.2 million albums, but 8 million had been downloaded illegally. Sheeran, however, was completely unfazed.

“There’s a decent balance between – you can live off your sales and you can allow people to illegally download it and come to your gigs. My gig tickets are £18 and my album is £8, so it’s all relative,” he said.

Now the Suffolk-born singer is back again with more controversial comments on piracy, this time in respect of the release of his new album. When asked by MTV when his new album would be available to fans, he offered the following teaser.

“It depends when I deliver it. If I deliver it to the label by the end of the year, it can come out early next year,” he said.

“And if I don’t deliver it by the end of the year, then I don’t know, I might just leak it. Put it on Limewire or something.”

Sheeran is signed to Atlantic, and they won’t like the LimeWire reference at all. The label was one of the plaintiffs that brought the company behind the file-sharing client to its knees in 2010.