Ed Sheeran’s ’Shape Of You’ sets new Spotify record with 1.38 billion streams

Ed Sheeran’s ’Shape Of You’ is now the most streamed song on Spotify. It has generated 1,318,420,396 plays since its January 6 release, the streaming service announced last Friday.

The previous record was Drake’s ’One Dance’ with 1,317,143,742 billion listens.

The Toronto rapper held the top spot for almost a year, taking over on October 18, 2016 from ’Lean On’ by Major Lazer and DJ Snake.

Drake remains Spotify’s most popular Spotify artist of all time. His second-most streamed song on the service is ’Too Good’ with nearly 600 million plays. 

The popularity of ’Shape Of You’ helped Sheeran’s entire back catalogue push up to 10 billion plays on Spotify – generating an estimated US$50 million in royalties for the 26-year-old British singer songwriter.

It’s not the first time that ’Shape of You’ has achieved a Spotify milestone.

It hit 10 million streams after its release on March 3, setting a new one-day one-track record.

Its parent album ÷ (Divide) set a new first-day record on the same day for the Swedish company with 56,727,861 streams. The album has achieved 10 million global sales.

Sheeran has 40,095,920 monthly listeners, putting him out in front in terms of monthly achievements.

Figures from Spotify identifies Mexico City as his biggest base (with 850 million monthly listeners) followed by Santiago, Chile (748 million) and Sao Paulo, Brazil (644 million). 

On Friday, Sheeran released the lyric video for ’Perfect’, the fourth single from Divide.

Only two other tracks have generated over a billion Spotify streams each: ’Lean On’ and ’Closer’ by The Chainsmokers.

Justin Bieber is close to joining the elite club with ’Sorry’, currently at 974 million after two years, and still counting.