Ed Sheeran’s humble rise to fame from busking to $400,000,000 fortune

In case you hadn’t noticed, Ed Sheeran has been in the news lately.

The Shape of You hitmaker has been on the receiving end of a lot of criticism after Macklemore was removed from Sheeran’s upcoming Loop Tour for expressing his solidarity and support for Palestine.

Following Macklemore’s removal, all of the support acts for the tour stepped away in solidarity, including Finneas and Sheeran’s backing band Beoga.

Questions remain over what is happening next with Ed Sheeran’s tour amidst the backlash, but it is a significant moment that has seen Sheeran’s safe and carefully cultivated brand take a hit on such a public scale.

Being one of the most successful songwriters of all time does make it easy to forget that Sheeran began from very humble beginnings before going on to sell over 120million records worldwide.

Where did Ed Sheeran grow up?

Ed was born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, in 1991 but largely grew up in Suffolk in a very artistic household.

His dad, John, is an art curator and lecturer, while his mum, Imogen, is a culture publicist and jewellery designer – and from a young age, Ed showed a liking for music (so did his brother, in fact, who became a composer himself).

He sang in the church choir from the age of four. He learned to play guitar at 11 and also played the cello, with his classmates at Thomas Mills High School voting him as most likely to be famous.

First independent releases and busking

When he was just 13, Ed began recording music and released his first independent work with the collection title Spinning Man.

From there, he kept on writing and recording before moving to London in 2008 to begin performing at small venues and even busking out on London street corners.

It was also at this time that he auditioned for the show Britannia High, a musical drama which ran for one season and acted as essentially the British version ofFame, following a group of kids in a performing arts school looking to achieve their dreams.

Ed was not successful in getting cast, but you can see his audition on YouTube.

College dropout and SB.TV breakthrough

In 2009, Ed began studying music at the Academy of Contemporary Music (ACM) in Guildford, but he didn’t stick around long.

After getting the opportunity to support hip-hop artist Just Jack on tour, he dropped out of ACM without permission to exploit the chance in front of him.

Soon after, he released a new EP called You NeedMe and posted a video through SB.TV, a new media company on YouTube that specifically highlights emerging talent in the acoustic, freestyling and hip hop scene.

Off the back of the video’s success, Ed was invited to support Example on tour before releasing his next EP Loose Change, which would feature his breakthrough single The A Team.

Loose Change would go on to become certified Gold in 2024, with over 100,000 copies in the UK alone.

He also began to get exposure in the US around this time, forming an unlikely friendship with musician and Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx, who spotted the young Sheeran at an open mic night in LA.

Foxx invited Sheeran to both stay at his home while in LA and to perform on his SiriusXM radio show, giving Sheeran his first major exposure in the US.

Chart success with Plus

Now something of a viral success on YouTube, and touring with popular artists, a studio deal quickly followed, with his first studio album Plus being released in 2011.

It reached number one on the UK album charts and became the second best-selling debut album in the UK at the time. It has now gone 9x Platinum in the UK, has spent over 400 weeks in the UK album charts and is currently the 27th best-selling album of the 21st century.

To cap off the success, Ed was awarded two Brit Awards in 2012, for British Breakthrough Act and British Male Solo Artists

Continued chart success

From there, it seemed the sky was the limit, with Ed going on to release eight studio albums to date, including2014’s Multiply, 2017’s Divide and 2021’s Equals.

Alongside those, he has also released No.6 Collaborations Project (2019), Autumn Variations (2023) and Play (2025).

Four of them have peaked at number one on the Billboard 200 charts, while Shape of You from the album Divide has gone on to become one of his most successful songs.

It was the first song to hit two billion streams on Spotify and went 11x Platinum in 2025.

Concert tour earnings

Like any popular recording artist, Ed Sheeran has, of course, gone on a number of major tours across his career, earning millions from his shows.

As of 2025, Ed Sheeran has reportedly sold over 19million tickets worldwide, wth his nominal gross standing around $1.75billion (£1.29m) according to Pollstar.

That puts him in ninth place when ranking the best-selling musical acts of all time, ahead of such icons as Celine Dion, Madonna and Paul McCartney.

In fact, at the time his Divide 2017-2019 tour ended U2’s eight-year reign of the highest-grossing concert tour of all time – a record that was later broken by Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour in 2023 (which was then quickly topped by Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour).

Songwriting and acting

Ed Sheeran has also continued to make a name for himself outside of his own music, as he has also written for a number of other artists.

Some of the most famous examples include Justin Bieber’s Love Yourself and BTS’s Permission to Dance.

He has also contributed to songs for the likes of One Direction, Hilary Duff and Rita Ora.

He has also been no stranger to both the big and small screen, appearing in a number of movies and TV shows in roles that range from cameos to more substantial parts.

He has played himself in Bridget Jones’s Baby, Yesterday and Red Notice, but perhaps is best known for appearing in an episode of the hit HBO series Game of Thrones.

He featured in the opening episode of season seven, titled Dragonstone, and even sang a song titled Hands of Gold.

His appearance in the show got, shall we say, a mixed reaction, with some fans finding that it broke the sense of immersion in the world.

Even stars of the show took issue, with Hodor star Kristian Nairn saying to the Huffington Post: ‘It’s a fantasy show. We’re all caught in this amazing world and spend so much time and money and talent to create, and all of a sudden there’s a pop star? What?’

What is Ed Sheeran’s net worth?

With all this success, a lot of people obviously ask the question: just how much money is Ed Sheeran worth?

You should always keep in mind that determining a celeb’s net worth is not an exact science, so always take figures given with a pinch of salt, but Ed is reportedly worth somewhere in the region of $400million (£299.1m).

This is based on both his enormous success as a musician and a portfolio that includes such enterprises as Gingerbread Man Records, his own line of hot sauce, his Sheeran by Lowden guitar business and his minority stake in Ipswich Town Football Club.

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