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Wake Me Up By Avicii Voted The Best Song Of The Decade

Wake Me Up By Avicii Voted The Best Song Of The Decade

A public vote on the decade's biggest selling songs put the Swedish DJ ahead of Ed Sheeran and Adele.

Simon Binns

Simon Binns

'Wake Me Up' by Swedish DJ Avicii has been named the best of the biggest selling songs of the last decade.

The biggest selling songs of the last ten years went head to head in a series of LADbible Twitter polls.

The Official Charts Company's decade-defining list is topped by - surprise, surprise - Ed Sheeran. who spent 14 weeks at Number 1 with 'Shape Of You' in 2017. Since then it's amassed over 4.5m chart sales.

He actually has three tracks in the Top 5 end-of-decade list - 'Thinking Out Loud' (3) and former Christmas number one 'Perfect' (5) - that's 53.8m combined sales, since you ask. Sheeran recently announced that he was taking a break from music, presumably to count all his money or the number of bedrooms in his house.

PA

Behind Ed's 'Shape Of You' is Mark Ronson's 'Uptown Funk' with Bruno Mars (3.28m); 'Despacito' (Remix) by Luis Fonsi & Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber ranks fourth overall this decade (3.15m).

In a list that some critics might describe as an asinine sea of ultra-beige dirge that shames us all, The Killers' 'Mr Brightside' may offer a small amount of solace. Despite being released in 2004, it was still the 12th biggest-selling single of the 2010s, with 2.85m sales.

But on to the polls.

The first of the group stages saw Drake's 'One Dance' edge past Uptown Funk, taking 39.1 percent of the 7.7k votes, compared to Ronson's 35 percent. Justin Bieber's self help ballad 'Love Yourself' and Clean Bandit's 'Rather Be' with Jess Glynne (the one off the adverts. All the adverts) finished third and fourth respectively.

Listen, you bought these records.

The next poll saw Avicii - who tragically died in April 2018 - grab 35.4 percent of the 11.1k votes, beating Goyte's 'Somebody That I Used To Know' (34.1 percent).

George Ezra's Shotgun came third, followed by Pharrell Williams' 'Happy', which contains arguably the worst lyric of the decade in 'Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof'.

The third group, aka the Ed Sheeran Handicap Stakes, featured all of his four songs in the top 20, forcing the country as a whole to take a long hard look at itself before voting for 'Shape Of You'.

The apparent apex of Sheeran's musical output got 34 per cent of the 7.5k votes, nudging out 'Thinking Out Loud' (26 percent), 'Castle On The Hill' (22 percent) and 'Perfect' (17 percent).

If anyone could stop Sheeran, surely it must be Adele, comfortably the biggest selling female artist of the decade.

She romped through her qualifying group, taking 37 percent of the 6,000 votes and casting a shadow over Daft Punk's 'Get Lucky' (it really is the sound of the summer etc), which got 29 percent.

John Legend's 'All Of Me' came third (18 percent), and only 15 percent were impressed by Maroon 5 and Xtina's 'Moves Like Jagger'.

In the end though, neither Ed nor Adele had what it takes to get past Avicii - aka Tim Bergling - a nice tribute to an artist who lost his life at just 28.

Bergling had struggled with alcohol use, which he admitted had taken a toll on his physical and mental health, eventually leading him to retire from live performance on 2017.

He was also a philanthropist, establishing House for Hunger in 2001, a charity that aimed to reduced global hunger, donating millions of dollars to pay for meals to charities across the world.

He also supported campaigns against human trafficking and gang violence.

'Wake Me Up' was the lead single from his 2013 album True and has charted at number one in 22 countries to date.

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Topics: avicii, Music, UK Entertainment