Ed Sheeran Officially Has Biggest Album Of 2017
Ed Sheeran beat out Taylor Swift for biggest album of 2017, and helped pump up album sales in the U.K. pretty significantly.
By nowproducerdave on January 4, 2018
The official count is in, and while it was close between Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran as far as sales, Ed Sheeran came out on top as having the biggest album of 2017.
For his album “Divide,” he sold the equivalent of more than 2,764,000 copies. We say “equivalent” because of how the numbers were calculated. As far as physical copies of the album, he sold about 1,102,000, but Taylor Swift sold the most copies of 2017 with 1,903,000 copies. So why didn’t Taylor get the title? Because the “biggest” album has more to do with popularity. Not that her “Reputation” album isn’t popular, it obviously was, but they used a lot of different calculations to name the “biggest” album, including album sales and number of streams. “Divide” had about 800,000 more streams than Taylor. Taylor Swift’s “Reputation,” by the way, came in third spot as far as “biggest” albums of 2017 despite dominating sales numbers. The other thing that hurt her numbers were that the album just came out in November, so all her numbers only include from November 10th through December 28th. She clearly would have absolutely dominated all categories if the album was released earlier in the year.
There is a lot more that goes into the calculations, and you can read about that here, but no matter how you crunch the numbers, it’s glaringly obvious that Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift are pretty much the King and Queen of music recently. In fact, Ed Sheeran is responsible for album sales in the U.K. increasing by about 10% from the year before, which makes 2017 the best year for album sales since 1998, as far as year-to-year growth is considered.
