Spotify's Greatest Hits

Being the most popular music streaming service in the world, there is probably no better company than Spotify to crown the song of the year. And so it has become a nice tradition for the Swedish company to publish its Year in Music list every December, treating us to some interesting insights about what the world was listening to in the year gone by.

According to this year’s list, Drake was clearly the most popular artist of 2018. Not only did the Canadian rapper single-handedly rack up 8.2 billion streams this year, he also took home the trophies for the most streamed album ("Scorpion") and the most streamed song ("God's Plan" – 1.1 billion streams).

As our chart illustrates, the most-streamed songs of the past six years also tell us something about the increase in music listening on Spotify. While Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ “Thrift Shop” was the most-streamed song of 2013 with “just” 160 million streams, this year’s number 1 hit was played nearly 7 times as often even though it fell short of Ed Sheeran's megahit "Shape of You", which was streamed an unbelievable 1.4 billion times in 2017.