Ed Sheeran Smashes Streaming Records With 2 New Singles

After a year of no new music, fans pressed play as Ed Sheeran dropped two tracks in Friday. Both songs quickly broke single day streaming records on Spotify globally.

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On their first day of release, Ed Sheeran's two new tracks, "Shape of You" and "Castle on the Hill" streamed globally 6,868, 642 and 6,168, 395 times respectively, smashing Spotify's global one day streaming record. Previous record holder One Direction had 4,759,698 streams with 'Drag Me Down' in August of 2015. The two Sheeran songs totalled 13 million plays in a single day, or roughly half-a-million plays per hour.

While a testimony to Sheeran's massive popularity, the increase over One Direction's total also reflects the massive growth in music streaming over the last 15 months. As of Monday morning, "Shape Of You" had been streamed 23.8 million times on Spotify, and "Castle On The Hill" had 18.1 million plays.

Cause I’ve been away for a bit here’s two singles rather than one – Castle On The Hill & Shape Of You https://t.co/QuZMnEhS8P pic.twitter.com/VCznN8nLd4

— Ed Sheeran (@edsheeran) January 6, 2017