Lewis Capaldi’s ‘Someone You Loved’ Is U.K. Most-Streamed Song
Written by djfrosty on November 15, 2022
The Official U.K. Singles Chart celebrates its 70th birthday, and Lewis Capaldi gets to blow out the candles.
For the occasion of its milestone anniversary, the Official Charts Company crunched the numbers to find the most-streamed song of them all.
Capaldi’s “Someone You Loved” wins the prize. The Scottish singer and songwriter’s breakthrough hit from 2018 has accumulated 562 million U.K. streams (including 480 million audio and 81 million video streams), beating Ed Sheeran’s “Shape Of You” and “Perfect,” respectively.
“Someone You Loved” is a classic slow-burn. The track bowed at No. 100 on the weekly chart following its release in November 2018, then embarked on its remarkable journey. In March 2019, the song hit No. 1, and stayed there for a total of seven weeks.
For the record, Capaldi received a special-edition matte black No. 1 Award gift from the OCC, which he can stow with his separate trophies for topping the weekly Official U.K. Singles Chart with “Somebody,” “Before You Go” and “Forget Me,” and with his debut album Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent, which led the Official U.K. Albums Chart for 10 cycles.
“Someone” is one of 132 singles that have amassed more than 200 million streams in the U.K., a list that includes George Ezra’s “Shotgun” (No. 4 all-time) and Tones And I’s “Dance Monkey” (No. 5).
The biggest selling single of them all is Elton John’s “Something About The Way You Look Tonight / Candle In The Wind 1997,” which has topped 4.94 million sales, and is one of 179 singles have reached 1 million sales.
The very first U.K. singles chart was published on Friday, Nov. 14, 1952 in the New Musical Express (NME), capturing “a rudimentary survey of 20 record shops by the music paper’s advertising manager Percy Dickins,” the charts compiler reports. Al Martino’s “Here in My Heart” has the distinction of being the first No. 1.
Today, sales and streaming data is captured each day from the OCC’s panel of more than 6,500 retailers and DSPs, including physical product, digital downloads and streams, and aggregated in its central computer system. The top 40 is presented each Friday on BBC Radio 1 and MTV, and the full top 100 is published on OfficialCharts.com.