Released in 2019, his fourth studio album No.6 Collaborations Project debuted at number one in most major markets, and spawned three UK number one singles, " I Don't Care", " Beautiful People" and " Take Me Back to London". The world's best-selling artist of 2017, he was named the Global Recording Artist of the Year. His fourth single from ÷, " Perfect", reached number one in the US, Australia and the UK, where it became the Christmas number one in 2017. By March 2017, Sheeran had accumulated ten top 10 singles from ÷ on the UK Singles Chart, breaking the record for most top 10 UK singles from one album.
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He also became the first artist to have two songs debut in the US top 10 in the same week. The first two singles from the album, " Shape of You" and " Castle on the Hill", broke records in a number of countries by debuting in the top two positions of the charts. Sheeran's third album, ÷ (pronounced "divide"), was released in March 2017, and was the best-selling album worldwide of 2017. A single from ×, " Thinking Out Loud", earned him the 2016 Grammy Awards for Song of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance. In the same year, × won Album of the Year at the 2015 Brit Awards, and he received the Ivor Novello Award for Songwriter of the Year from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors. It was named the second-best-selling album worldwide of 2015.
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Sheeran's second studio album, × (pronounced "multiply"), topped charts around the world upon its release in June 2014. In 2012, Sheeran won the Brit Awards for Best British Male Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Act. It contained his first hit single " The A Team". Sheeran's debut album, + (pronounced "plus"), was released in September 2011 and topped the UK Albums Chart. He signed with Asylum Records the same year. In early 2011, Sheeran independently released the extended play, No. Born in Halifax, West Yorkshire and raised in Framlingham, Suffolk, he began writing songs around the age of eleven.
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Success has only intensified Macklemore’s conflicted relationship with rap: On his 2017 solo single, “Good Old Days,” he looks back fondly at his early years as an unknown MC trying to break into the game however, the track’s elegant, ascendant piano chords and heartrending Kesha cameo suggests he’s grown evermore accustomed to playing the crowd-pleasing pop star.Edward Christopher Sheeran MBE ( / ˈ ʃ ɪər ən/ born 17 February 1991) is an English singer-songwriter. Their 2012 self-released debut, The Heist, crashed the Billboard Top 5 and scooped up four Grammys thanks to a string of unlikely crossover hits-like the sax-squawked anti-luxury anthem “Thrift Shop” and the pro-LGBTQ ballad “Same Love”-that betrayed his love of pre-millennial hip-hop sounds while interrogating some of the genre’s problematic materialist and homophobic tendencies.
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Upon connecting with producer Ryan Lewis in 2009, Macklemore finally acquired the megaphone that allowed him to project his big ideas to the masses. But during those DIY days, Macklemore developed a reputation for intense introspection and keen cultural observations-on his 2005 track “White Privilege,” he examined not only the gentrification of hip-hop from black street music to commercial commodity but also his own complicity in that process as a white MC. Hip-hop, he said, was “my means of trying to figure out who I am, and to figure out my truth, and look at society and get closer to a connection to something much bigger than myself.” It would take some time for him to make that greater connection: The MC born Benjamin Haggerty in 1983 dropped his first mixtape in 2000 and spent the next decade doing the underground grind. In a 2016 interview with Apple Music, Seattle rapper Macklemore recounted the moment when, at age 17, he realized his life’s true calling.