Drake Earns Title of Most Shazamed Artist of All Time

In honor of the music identification service’s 20th anniversary, they have partnered with Apple to share some stats. Among the most notable is Drake being crowned the most-Shazamed artist of all time with over 350 million Shazams across songs he’s both led and been featured on. At over 17 million Shazams, his 2016 smash-hit “One Dance” is his most popular song that people wanted to discover.

The illuminating report released by Shazam via Apple had many other interesting statistics. Lil Wayne was the first artist to reach a million Shazams in 2009. Two years later, he became the first artist to reach 10 million. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the first to hit the 100 million club, with that title instead going to David Guetta in 2015.

Initially, Shazam was launched in 2002 in the U.K. and was known as “2580,” a number people dialed to get their music recognized. The phone would automatically hang up after 30 seconds and text the song title and artist name.

The first song to be discovered using this method was “Jeepster” by T. Rex, while “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley was the most Shazamed song using the original dial-in method. Eventually, it was brought to the U.S. in 2004 on AT&T Wireless before finally being made into an app across various cell phone services between 2006-2008. The first Shazam on the iOS app was “How Am I Different” by Aimee Mann.

A lot of this Shazam data is a nice throwback to the good ol’ days. Remember “TiK ToK” by Ke$ha? Before it became a video-sharing app, it was a smash hit that also became the first track to be Shazamed a million times. That special 10 million Shazams title went to none other than Gotye and Kimbra’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.”

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The data also gave insight into some of the world’s biggest trends. In the midst of everyone obsessing over K-Pop, BTS’ “Butter” was the fastest track to reach a million Shazams in only nine days. However, Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” takes the cake for hitting 10 million Shazams in only 87 days.

There are also some surprises, like the exciting success story of busker-turned-pop-sensation Tones and I. The Australian singer broke countless records for her infectious 2019 hit “Dance Monkey, including most weeks spent at the top of the U.K. singles chart by a female artist and most weeks at number one on the Australian singles chart, but it broke some Shazam records too including most Shazamed song of all time (41 million), fastest track to break 20 million Shazams (219 days) and the top alternative track to be discovered through the service.

Let's see if Soulja Boy has something to say about this.

Photo by David X Prutting/BFA