Lewis Capaldi scores official most-streamed song of all time in the UK

Music stats

4.55 billion singles, 683 billion audio streams and 128 billion video streams (811 billion total streams) have been consumed in the UK.

1,404 singles have reached the Number 1 spot, from Al Martino’s Here In My Heart, to reigning chart topper Taylor Swift’s Anti Hero which was crowned at the end of October.

179 singles have reached 1 million sales, the biggest of them all being Sir Elton John’s Something About The Way You Look Tonight / Candle In The Wind 1997 on 4.94 million sales. The latest single to be crowned a million seller is Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off, her first to top 1m sales in the UK.

132 singles have been streamed more than 200 million times, the most streamed single of all time being Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Loved, with 562 million streams to its name (480m audio streams and 81 million video streams).The sales and streaming survey shows how music consumption has shifted over the years, with sales growing through the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, taking off again via the digital music explosion in the early part of the new century (the first legitimate download stores kicking off in 2004), reaching an extraordinary peak of 1.26bn sales in the Tens, the biggest decade in history for singles sales – reaching twice the level of any previous decade. Since then, streaming has exploded and has reached record levels in the Twenties.

The explosion of streams means that the constant flow of million sellers has now all but halted. At the time of the Singles Chart’s 60th anniversary in 2012, some 123 singles had reached the million landmark – Taylor Swift’s achievement in passing 1m sales with Shake It Off this year (her career first UK million-seller) brings the all-time total to 179.

This total is unlikely to grow much further, with streams now dominating (audio / video streams account for 98.6% of the singles market in 2022)

To date only Someone You Loved by Lewis Capaldi, plus Shape Of You and Perfect by Ed Sheeran, have topped 500m lifetime streams, with only seven tracks topping 400m lifetime streams. The track with most audio streams to its name is Shape Of You (502 million), the most streamed video is Baby Shark by Pinkfong (220 million).

In 2022, the average Number 1 single collects 6.82m streams in a week. To reach the Top 10 requires 2.83m streams, to reach the Top 40 1.31m streams. The number of Number 1s per year reached their peak in the year 2000 when 42 different songs topped the chart, and in the 2020s are in line with the yearly averages achieved in the Seventies, between 16 and 17 per annum.

Related. Louis Tomlinson and Bruce Springsteen battle for thus weeks no 1 album.