Ed sheeran was the most streamed artist on spotify in 2014

In 2014, Ed sheeran out streamed Eminem and coldplay by 860 million streams on spotify. This pushed Eminem and Coldplay to the second and third positions that year. The then 23-year old singer songwriters album X racked up 430 million streams worldwide at the time.

He moved to London as a teen to pursue music , and his exuding creativity got him hundreds of live shows. Drawing attention for his online performances, Sheeran hit No. 1 on the iTunes chart before he ever signed with a record label. Since signing with Atlantic, Sheeran has sold millions of records, had a song appear in the second installment of The Hobbit trilogy and won Grammys for hits like “Thinking Out Loud” (2014) and “Shape of You” (2017).

Let’s recall 5 of his chart-topping hits before the year ends, shall we?

1)Thinking Out Loud

This romantic ballad was actually written by Ed sheeran in his kitchen!! Sheeran wrote this love song about his girlfriend at the time, Athina Andrelos, who worked for the English celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver. The pair split up in early 2015 after dating for about a year.

The song broke the UK record for the most streams in a chart week when it was streamed 1.72 million streams in the week ending November 22, 2014.The record was broken a month later by Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk,” which achieved 2.34 million streams in the pre-Christmas week.

2)Photograph

Ed Sheeran thought he wrote “Photograph” on 6th Street in Denver, Colorado, so he got a tattoo saying “6 ST.” But when he returned to the location, he learned that the street was actually 6th Avenue.

Sheeran told Billboard magazine why he chose to go down such a personal route for the video. “A couple of reasons, I had no time to shoot an actual video, and two I was sitting at home at Christmas and my dad had found all the old footage and had it turned into DVDs for our Christmas present and we were looking through them and I thought ‘that’s amazing stuff,” he explained. “We were making a big documentary and so I asked if I could use some of that, and then looking at it I thought this could work for a music video as it was going chronologically so it’s cool.”

3)Shape of You

The song broke a Spotify record for streams in a single day when it was played 6,868,642 times globally in its first 24 hours. It broke the milestone previously set by One Direction’s “Drag Me Down,” which notched up 4,759,698 streams in August 2015. “Castle on the Hill,” which was released the same day, also shattered 1D’s record, accumulating 6,168,395 streams.

Ed Sheeran broke his own record when Divide was released on March 3, 2017. The song was streamed 10.12m times on Spotify in the 24 hours after the album was made available on the platform.

4)Perfect

The snowy video was shot on the ski slopes in Hintertux, Austria in October 2017. The story of Ed Sheeran falling in love with a girl he grew up was based on a script written by him and director Jason Koening (who made the clip for “Shape Of You”). The singer’s love interest is played by Beautiful Creatures and The Disaster Artist actress, Zoey Deutch.

Ed Sheeran wrote this waltz-time love song for his girlfriend Cherry Seaborn, who is an old school friend. After writing it he had no idea whether or not she really likes the track. “I just recorded it and sent it because she was living in New York at the time so I didn’t see her reaction,” he told BBC Radio 2. “I think she liked it, it’s a good’un (good one).”

5)The A Team

Sheeran explained the song title to Billboard magazine in a video interview: “A drug like crack cocaine is called an ‘class A’ drug. That’s in the same category as heroin. Instead of making it clear and just saying what the problem was, I’d say, ‘She’s in the ‘class A’ team.’ It was kind of my way of covering up (a person’s addiction), I guess, making it a bit more subtle.”

Sheeran told the story of the song to Q magazine: “I played at a Christmas gig for the homeless charity Crisis. I met this homeless there and her story inspired me to write a song. I wrote a tune about a similar situation, not entirely based on her, because I didn’t want to pinch someone else’s story.”