"Thinking Out Loud," a love ballad by English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, has become the first song to be streamed over half a billion times on popular music-steaming service Spotify.
Since its release in June 2014, the track has topped charts in Australia, Denmark, Ireland, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and South Africa, and in June became the first song ever to spend a full year in the UK's top 40.
Sheeran's second studio album, x, on which the song appeared, was Spotify's most streamed album in 2014.
Spotify estimates that one in four Spotify users have a Sheeran song on one of their playlists. At over 2.9 billion streams for his entire repertoire, the 24-year-old is Spotify's second-most streamed artist behind Eminem.
To celebrate Sheeran's record (and the amount of traffic he has brought to the site), Spotify released the "Sheerio Index": a map purporting to display where in the world Sheeran is most streamed - yet this data is skewed by the fact that Spotify is unavailable in Africa, the Middle East and most of Asia.
While Sheeran's song has broken a Spotify record, its 500 million streams pale in comparison to the more than 750 million views its official video has raked in on YouTube, which place it in the top 30 most-viewed videos on the site.
YouTube's most viewed video of all time is "Gangnam Style" by South Korean singer-songwriter Psy, which has been viewed over 2.4 billion times at the time of writing.
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