While we were nosing around Spotify this week, as you do, we noticed that Ed Sheeran is about to hit his latest mini-milestone on the service: 500m streams of his track ‘Thinking Out Loud’.
At the time of writing, it’s on 495.3m streams – his biggest track by some distance on Spotify ahead of the 285.5m streams for ‘I See Fire’.
We’re always keen to get our calculator out when thinking about these kinds of figures. If Spotify’s long-public average payout of $0.006 – $0.0084 still hold true – although there has been some debate about that – ‘Thinking Out Loud’ alone could have generated a payout to rightsholders of between $3m and $4.2m since its release in June 2014.
Meanwhile, there’s also a comparison to be made to YouTube, where the official video for the song has 740.3m views, plus another 28.1m for the official audio version, and 19m for an official acoustic performance.
Oh, and – gloriously – 2.1m views for a video of Ed performing the song to a group of cats. One final stat: Sheeran currently has just under 19.1m monthly listeners on Spotify.
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