Pop star Ed Sheeran has blasted back onto the Spotify streaming charts in a big way with his two new song releases, "Shape Of You" and "Castle On The Hill." Each song individually broke the record for most streams during a 24-hour period on Spotify.
Ed Sheeran's Big Comeback
After a stellar 2015, Ed Sheeran took the entire year of 2016 off to rest and work on new music. Now, in the early days of 2017, Sheeran has returned with a vengeance, releasing not one but two brand-new songs in advance of his new album.
The dual releases smashed all prior Spotify streaming records for single day streams. "Shape of You" received 6,868,642 plays, and "Castle On The Hill" was streamed 6,168,395 times, amassing over 13 million total plays in just one day.
The previous record for most plays for a song in a single day was held by Sheeran's friends in the group One Direction, with whom he has written several songs including "Little Things." One Direction had held the record for their 2015 hit "Drag Me Down," which garnered 4,759,698 streams back in July of that year. The record holder before that was Wiz Khalifa's "See You Again," which received 4,260,000 spins in April 2015.
What makes Sheeran's record so remarkable is that he did it in one day with two separate songs, each of which individually amassed enough plays to break the previous record. While "Castle On The Hill" is a more traditional sounding track from the singer songwriter, "Shape Of You" reflects current trends with influences of Caribbean and tropical house rhythms throughout, in the vein of 2016 hits such as Justin Bieber's "Sorry" (Sheeran also co-wrote Bieber's 2016 number 1 hit "Love Yourself"), Drake's "One Dance," and Rihanna's "Work."
Sheeran's New Style
In fact, Sheeran says he actually wasn't planning on using the song for himself and even considered offering it to the Caribbean queen.
"I went in to write songs for other people with a guy called Steve Mac and Johnny McDaid, and we were writing this song and I was like 'this would really work for Rihanna,'" explained Sheeran. "And then I started singing lyrics like 'putting Van The Man on the jukebox' and I was like 'well she's not really going to sing that, is she?' And then we sort of decided halfway through that we were just going to make it for me."
It looks as if that was a wise decision, as Sheeran's latest success with "Shape Of You" and "Castle On The Hill" bodes well for more hits in 2017, when he releases his upcoming full-length album.
