The Billions Club: Ed Sheeran (11/372)

 

   There is no getting around the number of billion stream songs credited wholly or partially to English songstress Ed Sheeran.  Sheeran's popularity is fascinating- my best guess is that if you looked at the listening habits of English-listening music audiences, Sheeran would be the favorite of listeners who listen to very few artists on a yearly basis.  In other words, if you listen to fewer that a hundred artists in a year, chances are that Ed Sheeran is one of those artists.  Since those people probably listen to just as much music as anyone, only fewer artists, people like Ed Sheeran are going to benefit from the high number of engagement between his music and listeners because those listeners aren't listening to many other artists so there is less competition.

    Sheeran had six tracks on the original Billions Club playlist published by Spotify on July 21st, 2021.  On four of those he is the sole credited artist.  On two he shares artist credit- those artists are Khalid on Beautiful People and Justin Bieber on I Don't Care.

     The four "original" Billions Club playlist solo tracks are Shape of You, Perfect, Photograph and Thinking out Loud.  Two of those songs are from his 2014 album X and two are from %, released in 2017.  The two shared tracks are both singles- Beautfiul is a 2019 single as is I Don't Care.   Sheeran is also one of a handful of artists who have a top 5 that is almost entirely billion stream tracks- four of his current top 5. 

   After the initial playlist was published in July 2021, Sheeran added five more tracks to get him to his current place on the list.  Three of those crossed one billion streams in 2021 and then he added two more in 2022, with the last, Shivers, crossing over  in November 7th, 2022. Several of these tracks have crossed the two billion streams list- which- again- there are only a handful of artists who have any tracks that have reached this threshold. 

  I did some quick searches on other artists who might be number one- I'm pretty sure it is Ed Sheeran- Post Malone has 9, Drake has 8, Rihanna has 5. ETC.    But I think the way you explain this phenomenon generally is that the people who listen to the fewest number of artists listen to Ed Sheeran the most, and there are more of those people than there are of people who listen to more artists.