(Hypebot) – 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.
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 Tuesday afternoon, "Shape Of You" had been streamed 31.5 million times on Spotify, and "Castle On The Hill" had 23 million plays. – Staff Writers
