Ed Sheeran leaves Warner Music Group after 15 years and 170 million albums sold

Ed Sheeran has left Warner Music Group after 15 years. The singer-songwriter revealed the news in a newsletter to fans on Friday, May 22, confirming that he parted ways with Atlantic Records and Asylum Records last month. The partnership produced eight studio albums and 170 million album sales worldwide.

“This isn’t a ‘disgruntled artist leaves record label’ type situation,” Sheeran wrote in the newsletter. “This is a boy who started as a teenager on the company with different priorities, to the father of 2 man who exists now, who feels like he needs a shift and change in the way he does things professionally.”

Sheeran said the split is amicable. “I leave the company with SO much love and gratitude for everything we have achieved together,” he wrote. “I love Ed Howard forever, I love Asylum forever, and the door is always open for the future.”

The numbers tell the scale of the partnership. Across his Warner run, the catalogue has racked up 126 billion global streams, 38 billion YouTube views and 14 tracks in Spotify‘s Billions Club. In the UK alone, he has scored 13 No.1 singles, 9 No.1 albums and 53 platinum and multi-platinum singles.

Warner Music Group will continue to release his catalogue, which spans his 2011 debut ‘Plus’ through 2025’s ‘Play’. The company said in a statement: “We’re proud to have supported Ed through his discovery and remarkable rise over the past 15 years and grateful for his continued partnership.”

Sheeran first met Ed Howard from Asylum Records at a Notting Hill show in 2009, when Sheeran was 18 years old. He recalled crashing at Howard’s place, playing him a bunch of music, and discovering later that Howard worked at a record label. When ‘No. 5 Collaborations’ came out, Sheeran signed instantly.

Beyond the headline split, his Warner-era highlights include ‘Divide’ (2017), which broke Spotify’s first-day streaming record with 56.73 million streams in 24 hours. The accompanying Divide tour generated $432 million in 2018 alone, the highest-grossing tour in a single calendar year at that time. The full 2017 to 2019 run became the highest-grossing concert tour of all time.

Now, Sheeran’s next steps are unconfirmed. He has not revealed where his future releases will be distributed. Plus, he is currently on the road with his Loop Tour in support of ‘Play’, which began in Auckland in January 2026 and runs through December.

“Over the last 15 years, I’ve put out so much music, and had so much success with that company,” Sheeran wrote. “My life is hugely different now to what it was when I was a teenager, and I’ve been feeling in my gut for a long time that a lot of things in my professional life need to change.”

He added: “I am, underneath it all, a singer songwriter who plays pub gigs. And I’ve sorta morphed into this pop star who plays stadiums over 15 years, it’s a super amazing thing to have happened but also a lot to get your head around.” Find more on Ed Sheeran via his official site.