Ed Sheeran is popular because he is a generational talent. Ed Sheeran is popular because his output is generic and bland. Ed Sheeran is popular because he reinvents himself in line with the latest musical trends. Ed Sheeran is popular because he has a distinctive style. Ed Sheeran is popular thanks to his hardcore fanbase. Ed Sheeran is popular because the public are forcibly subjected to his songs via relentless airplay and playlist domination. Ed Sheeran is an earnest, authentic troubadour who grafted on the open-mic circuit for years. Ed Sheeran is a cynical shapeshifting pop music machine who gamed the algorithm. Ed Sheeran is the perennial underdog of pop. Ed Sheeran is its king.

Middle England’s megastar bard is a mass of contradictions, but one thing is crystal clear: he is unbelievably popular. We are spoiled for stats to prove it, but here are two: Sheeran has the most Spotify followers of any artist on the planet (10 million more than Taylor Swift, his good friend and closest competitor); Sheeran has been the most played artist in the UK for six out of the last eight years. His debut, + (Plus), was the UK’s third best-selling album of 2012 – but he was largely viewed as trite teen girl fodder. Then there was a serious step up in 2014, the year the Suffolk-bred singer-songwriter scored his first UK No 1 single with Sing, a frisky, Pharrell Williams-produced account of drunken desire that saw Sheeran graft rap, funk and rowdy dance-pop on to the acoustic balladry that had become his calling card. That year he would also become Spotify’s most-streamed artist in the world. With his newfound sliver of edge and clever genre-blending, Sheeran had proven he was ready to step out of his troubadour-next-door box and into full pop star mode.

Yet Sheeran went further than just becoming a pop star – he ended up reshaping pop stardom in his own scruffy, unassuming image. In so many ways, the intervening decade of pop has belonged to the 33-year-old: his ability to exist across multiple binaries at once – earnest/calculated, eclectic/bland, ordinary/exceptional – means his career has dictated, fuelled and intertwined with practically all the major developments in modern music. The story of Ed Sheeran’s unit-shifting ubiquity is also the story of contemporary pop – and a roadmap for its future.

The 2010s were a time when stars stopped relying on the traditional press and began using social media as their main publicity tool. To cultivate the impression of intimate relatability that fuels these platforms, they needed to swap distant gloss for fallible approachability: ordinary clothes, goofy friendliness and simple pleasures were in; theatrical costumes, dangerous mystery and the finer things were out. This was a game Sheeran knew exactly how to play. He held his newfound status at arm’s length by repeating his hard-knocks origin story (he spent time sleeping rough in London while playing hundreds of tiny gigs). Although his scruffy hoodie-and-jeans get-up may have been second nature, it was also a ploy; in 2014 Sheeran told the Observer he would never get a stylist because “if you make someone look too like a star, no one’s going to have any connection with them”. His lyrics traded in this normalcy: broad-strokes sentimentality and references that rang with specific ordinariness (V05 wax, Shrek, alcohol decanted into plastic bottles). His stage setup – he generally avoids backing bands in favour of his guitar and a loop pedal – hammered home that sense of unmediated honesty.

The point of all this relatability is to fuel intense parasocial relationships: the modern celebrity’s bread and butter. Sheeran – who provided the personal touch by Zooming with fans on the release day of his 2021 single Bad Habits, and has long insisted he is essentially no different to his followers – is fluent in this dynamic (one that is partly responsible for solo artists such as himself superseding bands in popularity; it’s harder to foster emotional connection with groups online). Although he may seem out of step with his peers where rabid fanbases are concerned – his don’t tend to make headlines any more – he was actually a pioneer in the field. In 2012, the Guardian’s music critic Alexis Petridis found himself under attack from the “Sheeranators”, superfans willing to viciously fight the object of their affection’s corner online.

Yet it wasn’t only his fans, or even humans, who catapulted Sheeran into global stardom. In 2014 – just as Taylor Swift pulled her entire catalogue from Spotify (“It is my opinion that music should not be free,” she said), and before a clutch of superstars launched their supposedly lucrative rival service Tidal – Sheeran was waxing lyrical about streaming services. “Ed Sheeran ‘owes career to Spotify’” ran a BBC headline for an interview in which the musician attributed his ability to tour globally to the platform. “Spotify is not even a necessary evil,” he said. “It helps me do what I want to do.”

At this stage, Sheeran grasped what many – even the uber-astute Swift – still hadn’t: recorded music was no longer a commodity in itself. Instead, success was best sought by expanding your potential pool of fans with free-to-stream music, then eventually milking the converts with huge, expensive arena shows, the model pretty much all stars now follow (Sheeran’s 2017-19 Divide tour was the most lucrative ever at the time, a position Swift’s Eras Tour currently holds). But it wasn’t only about future income; Sheeran understood that streaming allowed for unprecedented reach. His 2017 hit Shape of You became the first song to reach 2bn streams on the platform – a headline-grabbing achievement that helped him ascend to a state of self-perpetuating ubiquity.

While Sheeran was breaking records on Spotify, he was also breaking something else: the charts. In July 2014, the Official Charts Company began incorporating streaming numbers; that first week, every single track from Sheeran’s album x (Multiply) appeared on the Top 100. When it came to his third album, 2017’s ÷ (Divide, the entire tracklist had a place on the Top 20, with nine songs in the Top 10. The goalposts were duly moved as a result; now only three songs by one artist can appear on the chart to allow newer acts to get a look in.

The monoculture – the cultural mainstream that acts as a near-universal reference point – has been irrevocably fragmented through on-demand streaming and internet bubbles. Yet the mechanisms that were put in place to mitigate Sheeran’s success proves the core concept remains: it’s just narrower and more monotonous than before. Rather than chart hits reflecting divergent tastes and fandoms, a select few songs and artists dominate (particularly those who successfully transitioned from the tail end of the top-down record company and radio-dictated music industry into a viral-hit powered landscape, such as Beyoncé, Rihanna, Harry Styles and Drake). In the UK over the past decade, eight songs have topped the charts for 10 weeks or more, a feat achieved just once in the previous 30 years. Unsurprisingly, Sheeran is the only artist to do the double, with Shape of You in 2017 and Bad Habits in 2021.

Even as Sheeran was forced to release his grip on the charts post-2017, his influence has continued to loudly echo through them. Sheeran’s baseline sound – a rootless, mid-tempo fusion of old-school R&B and post-Britpop indie – was taken up by a glut of fellow guitar-toting crooners (Lewis Capaldi, George Ezra, Tom Walker), who also channelled his down-to-earth persona and shifted records by the shedload. His impact shows no sign of abating. At the time of writing, Sheeran descendents Rag’n’Bone Man, Teddy Swims and Michael Marcagi are all in the UK Top 20 – as is Vermont singer-songwriter Noah Kahan; the self-anointed “Jewish Ed Sheeran” has already topped the UK charts for seven weeks this year with his hit Stick Season.

Yet Sheeran has always outpaced his pretenders. Never shy about his fixation on sales (“I do have numerical targets,” he said in 2017, revealing he had data sheets emailed to him each week), he has been commercially diversifying from the get-go. Sheeran’s collaborations with grime artists at the start of his career gave him a gateway into rap. In the runup to Divide’s release, he crafted songs to cater to both Radio 1 and Radio 2 listeners (the tropical house-inflected Shape of You and nostalgic power ballad Castle on the Hill respectively). He made the Irish folk-themed Galway Girl to appeal to the “400 million people in the world that say they’re Irish” and has strayed into massive global genres including Afrobeats (Peru with Fireboy DML), reggaeton (Forever My Love with J Balvin) and metal (his Cradle of Filth collaboration is out later this year).

Sheeran is clever with his stylistic promiscuity: his magpie proclivities tend to remove all subversion and idiosyncrasy from the original genres, producing a more palatable middle-ground sound machine-tooled to climb the charts (see especially: Bad Habits, his anodyne take on the Weeknd’s sinister R&B). It’s an approach that is increasingly widespread: instead of a distinctive community or subculture, genres become a mild seasoning that artists such as Sheeran use to pique interest without alienating their existing audience. The end result is a sludgy, vague, inoffensive post-genre sound that has served to homogenise music in general.

This is why, despite his keen genre-blending, Sheeran’s output exists in a sonic comfort zone (in doing so, his output chimes with the safe, repetitive nature of pop culture at large over the past decade, as it has reverted to reboots and endlessly recycled IP). Yet in 2017 his ability to deal in soothing familiarity entered a newly fraught era. The financial monopoly of the biggest stars – plus the phenomenon of keen-eared social media users sharing melodic similarities between songs online – appears to have increased accusations of plagiarism. This has led to artists pre-empting issues by interpolating or sampling existing songs – turning the charts into an endless nostalgia trip – while others dole out songwriting credits post-release to avoid legal action, something Sheeran did in 2017 when No Scrubs songwriters Kandi Burruss and Tameka Cottle were added to the credits of Shape of You.

The same year, an out-of-court settlement was made between Sheeran and musician Matt Cardle after Sheeran’s song Photograph was accused of copying notes from Cardle’s 2012 single Amazing. Sheeran regretted it, claiming in 2022 that the move opened “the floodgates,” when it came to copyright lawsuits. A year later, when he was taken to court due to the similarities between Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On and his hit Thinking Out Loud, Sheeran was determined to frame these challenges as an existential problem for musicians, vowing to quit altogether if he was found to have breached copyright. He wasn’t – and if his Photograph settlement opened the floodgates, this victory has undoubtedly nudged them in the opposite direction. Even better, the court case allowed Sheeran to breathe new life into a crucial element of his persona – and a quality that is increasingly defining pop stardom: underdog status.Last year a Sheeran fan told the Guardian he connected with the musician “because I’m also that uncool guy – a lot of us fans are”. From endless comic-book movies to Elon Musk, the past decade has seen nerds inherit the zeitgeist, and the scruffy, obsessive, slightly awkward Sheeran – who told Graham Norton he once constructed a Lego set on a date – can claim to bea part of that. “Taylor was never the popular kid in school. I was never the popular kid in school,” Sheeran said in 2017, turning his and Swift’s wild thirst for success into a revenge-of-the-nerds narrative. “Then you get to the point when you become the most popular kid in school – and we both take it a bit too far […] It also comes from always being told that you can’t do something and being like, ‘Fuck you. I can.’”

Sheeran’s winning-loser mentality ties into his relatable, everyman persona – “I’ve done around about a thousand shows but I haven’t got a house, plus I live on a couch”, he sang on early hit You Need Me, I Don’t Need You – and he’s not alone. Nowadays everyone is having their own pity party. Supposedly candid pop star documentaries following everyone from Billie Eilish to Robbie Williams (and Sheeran himself) seem designed primarily to cultivate sympathy, while breakthrough stars trade on victimhood and injustice: Olivia Rodrigo found fame as the teary dumpee on Drivers License, while Raye’s ongoing resurgence was kickstarted by her accusation that her label had deliberately suppressed her career for years.

Now, a decade on from Sing and his Spotify dominion, Sheeran’s imperial phase is petering out. His last album, the subdued and dreary Autumn Variations, produced no Top 10 singles and viewed alongside its melancholic, restrained predecessor, – (Subtract), suggests Sheeran is now less interested in pursuing smash hits. Yet his influence still resonates loudly through the zeitgeist: genre-hopping is now de rigueur, leaving increasingly muddy footprints over the spectrum of musical styles; resistance to the streaming model has dissolved entirely; mega-tours by established heavyweights are now the most important financial facet of the music industry; chart-clogging success is only getting more frequent; and staunch relatability is still the dominant currency for Gen Z superstars such as Eilish and Rodrigo.

In truth, however, Sheeran probably isn’t going anywhere. The stagnant, concentrated monoculture the musician helped will into being is one that will preserve its existing megastars; Sheeran is part of a small, success-hoarding cohort who rake it in as their fellow musicians are forced to work day jobs, while the ladder he climbed (honing his craft and meeting contacts on the club and pub circuit) has been kicked to the curb, with venues in the UK closing at record rates. In this new, rarefied pop landscape, Ed Sheeran has secured his invincible tenure: should he want it, there will always be a space at the top of the charts for pop’s underdog-king.