Come on now, follow my lead

Continuing my trip up the list of the most streamed songs for each year.  

2017 : Shape Of You - Ed Sheeran

This is another one of Ed's tracks where he puts a whole load of not-very-much together and comes up with a surprisingly decent song. The video, however, is 4:24 of utter nonsense which involves Ed picking up a beautiful lady at a boxing gym, but she deserts hiim so he has to go on a training binge (just so he can show off his tattoos) and then fight a sumo wrestler for no obvious reason. And so, obviously, it's got nearly 6.5 billion views on YouTube.

Wikipedia has a massive amount (506 milliPeppers) which means this is second to only "Bohemian Rhapsody" for single track entry size - interestingly, over half of it is a list of the 361 references used throughout the entry, so I think we can safely say it's been researched thoroughly. Apparently it (the song, not the Wikipedia entry) was written with Rihanna in mind, but when the lyrics sprang into life they were more suited to Ed. so he ran with it. I also learned, to my horror, that things could have been way worse because Ed asked Jay-Z to provide a rap section, but Jay declined saying "haven't people suffered enough?" (or something like that).

The most interesting sections are on copyright issues - the writers, Ed, Steve Mac and Johnny McDaid (of Snow Patrol) accepted the influence of TLC's "No Scrubs" so the writers of that song have been given songwriting credits on this one. However, whilst acknowledging similarities to "Oh Why" by Sami Chokri and Ross O'Donoghue, they did not accept they had been influenced by it and so it all ended up in court, which Ed and his mates won - Mr Sheeran does make a valid point that coincidences are going to happen when 60,000 tracks are released on Spotify every day (which is 22 million a year, which I guess is quite a few!). 

The critics were a bit mean about it, but in a half-hearted "what's the point" way - Spin amused me by describing it as "a plausible attempt at convincing us he has had sex". Funnily enough, the public paid no attention to anything anyone said and bought it droves - if not droves of droves. There are millions of stats I could give you, but let's just stick with this being the second most streamed song on Spotify ever (after The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights") with 3.6 billion streams. Charts-wise, it would be quicker for me to list the places it didn't get to #1 - the only places it didn't seem to make the top ten were Singapore and Venezuela.

It spent FOURTEEN weeks at #1 in the UK so, unsurprisingly, it was the top of the year-end chart here - he also had "Castle On The Hill" (#3), "Galway Girl" (#5 - SERIOUSLY?!?) and "Perfect" (#6) in there. The other tracks in the top five are Luis Fons/Daddy Yankee/Justin Bieber's "Despacito" and French Montana's "Unforgettable" (which, ironically, I'd completely forgotten about). Other tracks that jumped out at me were Clean Bandit's "Symphony" (#7) and "Rockabye" (#23), Rag'n'Bone Man's "Human" (#8), Dua Lipa's "New Rules" (#10), DJ Khaled's "Wild Thoughts" (#13), Ariana Grande's "One Last Time" (#38) and Anne-Marie's "Ciao Adios" (#40 - known in our house as "Shower The Horse"). All in all - there were some decent pop tracks scattered throughout this year.

Looking further down the chart throughout the year, the only ones I vaguely remember were Niall Horan's "Slow Hands", Rita Ora's "My Song", P!nk's "What About Us?", Taylor Swift's "Look What You Made Me Do", Camilla Cabello's "Havana" and Big Shaq's "Man's Not Hot" - decent enough, but not exactly numerous. Looking over the pond, Ed was #1 over there as well (and "Despacito" was #2) - their chart had more differences to ours than we've seen over recent years, but I can't say I recognised too many of the US hits.

I don't think Ed produced one of my favourite tracks of the year, but it is one of his more bearable tracks and this just feels like one of those years that you shouldn't argue with the numbers - so I won't. Well done, Mr Sheeran - and we get to see you one more time before it's all over!

2016 - Decent enough
2018 - The best someone song since the last one