Ed Sheeran, Macklemore, Lukas Graham & Aaron Rowe

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Ed Sheeran writes pop songs with an acoustic guitar at the centre of them: quick, percussive strumming, melodies shaped as much by rap phrasing as by folk, and a voice that keeps its conversational edge even at full volume. The songs deal in specific people and small, plain details rather than grand statements. The catalogue keeps returning to three modes. There are the fast, rhythmically dense songs that use the guitar as a drum kit; the plain-spoken ballads built almost entirely on melody; and the outright pop records made for the widest possible room. Underneath all of them sits the same method, which is one person and one guitar working a tune out before anything else is added. Collaboration is a constant as well, and the writing has proved unusually portable between genres. Born in 1991, he began putting out music independently as a teenager and built a following by playing constantly and posting the results, before his first album arrived in 2011. The records since, among them x, divide, equals, subtract, Autumn Variations and Play, have kept a steady rhythm, and the work has won Grammy Awards. The live show is built on a loop pedal. He plays alone for much of it, recording a guitar figure, a percussive slap on the body of the instrument, a vocal line, and stacking them in real time until one person sounds like a full band. It is why a very large room can still feel like a small one, and why the audience ends up doing so much of the singing. It suits anyone who wants the songwriting first and the spectacle second: a guitar, a voice, and a crowd that already knows the words.