Ed Sheeran Tops Spotify’s All-Time Global Streaming Record With 69 Million Monthly Listeners

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Following the release of his No. 6 Collaborations album, Ed Sheeran has broken another Spotify streaming record.

The collaboration album became the fastest-selling album so far this year.

Spotify confirmed today that Ed Sheeran set a new record for the highest number of global monthly listeners on its platform. At the time of writing, Sheeran sits just shy of 70 million monthly listeners. That number dwarfs Drake’s monthly listener count shortly after he dropped the Scorpion album last year.

Under Spotify’s rules, a monthly listener is defined as the number of individual global users who have played an artist’s music within a rolling 28 day period. Spotify’s monthly active users from March indicate that the company has around 217 million users. That means approximately 32% of Spotify’s user base has listened to at least one Ed Sheeran song this month.

That’s astounding, though it also raises serious questions about the extreme conglomeration of streams around top artists like Sheeran. Whether the hold of top-ranked, major label-powered artists is easing has been debated, though stats like these suggest that top-ranked superstars will continue to horde listening hours — at the expense of emerging and indie talent.

But even the gulf between Sheeran and number two is eye-popping.  Shawn Mendes sits comfortably in second place with ‘only’ 56.48 million monthly listeners.  Spotify confirmed that Sheeran’s No. 6 Collaborations landed in more than 800 playlists since its release on July 12th.

Spotify Artists With The Most Monthly Listeners — 2019

• Ed Sheeran – 69.65m
• Shawn Mendes – 56.48m
• Camila Cabello – 54.99m
• J Balvin – 54.58m
• Khalid – 54.56m
• Justin Bieber –52.05m
• Billie Eilish –50.02m
• Post Malone –48.54m
• Lil Nas X –48.37m
• Daddy Yankee – 46.70m

Despite the massive success, however, it doesn’t appear as though No. 6 Collaborations will surpass Sheeran’s 2017 album Divide.

The new album features Cardi B, Justin Bieber, Khalid, Stormzy, Eminem, and Travis Scott.  Sheeran and Scott recently took the stage together at The O2 in London to perform “Antisocial,” one of the hits from the album.

Five of the top ten tracks worldwide on Spotify were from Sheeran’s latest album on July 12th.  Sheeran’s song with Justin Bieber, “I Don’t Care,” was Spotify’s second-biggest song worldwide on its release day.