Sheeran is the top British artist on the streaming platform.
Findings from research carried out on musicians’ popularity on Spotify identified the hottest artists right now. The research also checked the 30 most streamed songs on the platform and ranked them based on their combined popularity on Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok.
As the year is coming to an end, platforms such as YouTube and Spotify publish recaps of some of the best moments and most popular songs and artists of 2023. Spotify crowned Taylor Swift as the top artist of the year in terms of streams since the 1st of January (some 26 billion listens), but our team was curious to see whether she was the most streamed artist of all time. It turns out that on Spotify, she ranks third globally. The most streamed artist from the UK, Ed Sheeran, is at the 5th position with more than 49 billion plays globally.
The researchers at Bonus Insider also checked the total global streams of these artists towards the end of 2023 and found that within the research period, the artist who rose in popularity the most on the platform was Taylor Swift. The total streams of her 550 tracks on Spotify increased by roughly 1.86 billion or 2.86%. Other artists whose streams rose fairly quickly within this period were The Weeknd (1.62% to 57.66 billion), Travis Scott (1.41% to 40.1 billion), and Bad Bunny (1.38% to 72.97 billion). Despite the slow increase in popularity of Ed Sheeran’s songs, in comparison, at only 0.68% to 49.55 billion, they estimate he will reach 50 billion total global streams in January of 2024.
Interestingly enough, when data covering the overall popularity of some of Sheeran’s biggest hits on YouTube and TikTok, they are among the most iconic tracks of the 21st century. His 2017 song “Shape of You” has amassed more than 6 billion views on YouTube and has been mentioned close to 2 billion times on TikTok. On Spotify, it is the second most streamed track after The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights”. On all three platforms combined, “Shape of You” is the second most popular song after “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi.
More details about the methodology used to arrive at these conclusions can be found in the full report.
