By Matt Neal of the ABC
Hanson was huge for a moment thanks to MMMBop.
Photo: Wikipedia
Hanson. Toni Basil. The Knack. Baha Men. Minnie Riperton. Chumbawumba.
If you know these acts, reading their names has probably started a song playing in your head.
For most people, it will be the same song.
MMMBop. Mickey. My Sharona. Who Let The Dogs Out? Loving You. Tubthumping.
This is the magic and the curse of the one-hit wonder – that your name is instantly recognisable and forever connected to a single piece of music, but that’s as far as your career extends in the minds of the masses.
But who is the ultimate one-hit wonder?
And can we use maths, Spotify data and good old-fashioned common sense to answer that question?
Defining a one-hit wonder
No musician wants to be a one-hit wonder – they want a long, fruitful career, where every song they release is lapped up by an adoring public.
But every act that experiences great success is a one-hit wonder until the second hit comes along.
It’s this potential gulf between the first hit and the second that truly defines a one-hit wonder as such.
That gulf is the key figure we’ve relied on for this investigation – basically, the bigger the gulf, the more worthy you are of the title of one-hit wonder.
If you don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of how we compiled this absolutely-not-definitive list, scroll on, but if you’re already firing up your typewriter for an angry “letter to the editor”, here come the caveats.
How this list was compiled
The starting point was compiling a list of 226 alleged one-hit wonders, pulled from countdowns from the BBC, VH1, Rolling Stone and more, and assessing the Spotify data for these acts.
The key figure here is the “secondary success rate” between these acts’ biggest hit and their second-most streamed song.
That secondary success rate is expressed as a percentage to account for the huge difference in streaming numbers, making it much easier to compare, say, Joe Dolce’s Shaddap You Face (6.7 million streams as of writing) and Passenger’s Let Her Go (2.3 billion).
It works like this – if the act’s big hit had, for example, 1,000 streams, and the second-biggest hit had 500 streams, then we judge the second song to have been half as successful – a secondary success rate of 50 per cent.
If the big hit had 1,000 streams, and the second got just 100, then the second song was only 10 per cent as successful.
And so on and so forth.
The lower the percentage, the more an act is seen as a one-hit wonder.
As for the definition of “hit”, we’ve set it at 10 million streams. So sorry Mr Dolce, you missed the cut (but would have placed #22).
Yes, Spotify isn’t perfect
Obviously this is a flawed approach to answer a ridiculous and redundant question.
Spotify is a limited data set (particularly when it doesn’t have an artist’s entire back catalogue) and doesn’t fully represent a song’s success.
There’s also the complicating factor of having multiple versions of the same song on the streaming platform.
Remasters, radio edits and extended versions (i.e. slightly altered versions of the same recording) have been counted as a single song, whereas markedly different remixes, live versions and re-recordings have been counted as separate songs.
In the case where multiple vastly different versions of a song hold multiple top spots for an artist, we’ve gone with the biggest one and ignored the rest to get to the bottom of what their next biggest different song is.
The advantage of using Spotify data is it gives a good real-time assessment of a song’s popularity, as well as providing a relatively even playing field for comparing acts from different eras and different countries.
So who’s the ultimate one-hit wonder act of all time?
It’s probably not who you think it is
Firstly, let’s go through some of the surprising results – the acts that aren’t even close to being one-hit wonders using our metric, despite what you (and VH1’s top 100 One-Hit Wonders list) might think.
Some of the usual suspects on those usual lists threw up some surprisingly small gaps between their big hit and their second-biggest song.
Minnie Riperton’s Les Fleurs was 50.4 per cent as successful as her iconic hit Lovin’ You.
Twisted Sisters’ I Wanna Rock has 61.2 per cent of the streams of their chantable smash We’re Not Gonna Take It.
And Psy’s That That has 56.6 per cent of the plays that his world-conquering Gangnam Style has.
To make it into our top 40, let alone the top 10, you needed a secondary success rate below one per cent, so acts like Hanson (12 per cent), The Proclaimers (8.7 per cent), Baha Men (6.4 per cent) and Los Del Rio (4.77 per cent) weren’t in the hunt.
Some of the favourites came close – The Knack (1.44 per cent), 4 Non Blondes (1.56 per cent), and The Vapors (1.2 per cent) just missed out on the top 40.
But here are our top 10 ultimate one-hit wonders of all time.
10. Boy Meets Girl
Hit: Waiting For A Star To Fall (1988). Streams: 95,949,424
Miss: Bring Down The Moon (1989). Streams: 289,538
Secondary success rate: 0.30 per cent
Songwriting duo George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam wrote two of Whitney Houston’s biggest hits – How Will I Know and I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me). But as Boy Meets Girl they stepped into the spotlight, scoring a top 10 hit in the US and UK (and #35 in Australia) with Waiting For A Star To Fall. They’ve released five albums and EPs over the year, but nothing has come close to their smash hit, which continues to be sampled, remixed and re-interpreted to this day. Follow-up single Bring Down The Moon is a distant second.
9. White Town
Hit: Your Woman (1997). Streams: 153,908,744
Miss: White Town (1997). Streams: 421,537
Secondary success rate: 0.27 per cent
This lost ’90s classic (#59 in the triple j Hottest 100 of 1997) gained a new lease of life in 2020 thanks to Dua Lipa using the same sad trumpet sample in her song Love Again. White Town AKA Jyoti Prakash Mishra told Billboard in 2020 that the success and short-lived fame of Your Woman affected his mental health, but almost three decades on he says he’d prefer to be a one-hit wonder “than a no-hit wonder”. A 1917-sounding re-recording of Your Woman is his second-most-played track, but his second biggest song is a self-titled track (yep, he has a song called White Town) that’s almost cracked half a million plays – well short of Your Woman.
8. Toni Basil
Hit: Mickey (1982). Streams: 51,937,954
Miss: Girls Night Out (1986). Streams: 121,399
Secondary success rate: 0.23 per cent
Allow me to plant an earworm in your mind with just five simple words: “Hey Mickey, you’re so fine…”. Singer/dancer/actress/choreographer Basil is fiercely protective of her renamed remake of Racey’s Kitty, suing everyone from Disney to South Park for alleged unauthorised usage of the track. The 80-year-old even re-recorded the song in 2020, amassing over 15 million Spotify plays in the process. Taking the re-recording into account would give her a secondary success rate closer to 30 per cent, but it doesn’t count because that’s the rules. What does count is her single Girls Night Out, which has over 121,000 plays, compared to the almost 52 million for the OG Mickey.
7. Charles & Eddie
Hit: Would I Lie To You? (1992). Streams: 222,610,006
Miss: 24-7-365 (1995). Streams: 486,011
Secondary success rate: 0.22 per cent
This soul-pop duo is a good example of how a band’s one-hit-wonder status depends on where you live. In their home country of America, Charles & Eddie were unheard-of beyond their smash hit Would I Lie To You?. In the UK, that song was just one of four top 40 hits they had. But Spotify’s data leans towards the American experience – their single 24-7-365 has about 0.2 per cent of the hits of Would I Lie To You?. That’s not likely to change anytime soon, as the duo broke up in 1997 after just two albums, and Charles passed away in 2001 aged 37.
6. Deep Blue Something
Hit: Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1995). Streams: 337,583,003
Miss: Halo (1995). Streams: 647,615
Secondary success rate: 0.19 per cent
This ode to two people connecting over an Audrey Hepburn movie (and nothing else) stands head and shoulders over everything else the Texan band has on Spotify, partly because it was a worldwide smash and partly because three of their albums are missing from the platform. The band broke up in 2001, but reunited in 2014 and are still going strong. Their second most-streamed song on Spotify is Halo, the follow-up single to Breakfast At Tiffany’s, which stalled at #102 on the US charts.
5. Tag Team
Hit: Whoomp! (There It Is) (1993). Streams: 53,457,649
Miss: Pig Power (1995). Streams: 74,443
Secondary success rate: 0.14 per cent
This Atlanta, Georgia hip-hop duo only has five songs on Spotify, and four of those are variations of Whoomp! (There It Is). This is depriving the world of their extensive back catalogue, which includes Addams Family (Whoomp!), Whoomp! (There It Went), and Here It Is, Bam!.
4. Norman Greenbaum
Hit: Spirit In The Sky (1969). Streams: 515,439,750
Miss: Marcy (1969). Streams: 613,898
Secondary success rate: 0.12 per cent
Jewish singer-songwriter Norman Greenbaum retired from music to become a dairy farmer a couple of years after this Christian-themed tune went big. While he returned to the music biz in the ’80s and then again in the 2010s, Greenbaum’s meagre back catalogue has kept Spirit In The Sky’s one-hit wonder status safe. It’s had over half a billion streams on Spotify, while his next biggest song Marcy has had just over half a million.
3. Len
Hit: Steal My Sunshine (1999). Streams: 198,979,446
Miss: Candy Pop (1995). Streams: 190,731
Secondary success rate: 0.10 per cent
Inescapable in the Aussie summer of ’99-’00, Canadian punk-rock duo Len found success beyond their wildest dreams after taking on a hip-hop bent with Steal My Sunshine. The song was a top 10 hit around the world, becoming a summertime hit in the US, Canada and Europe before making its way to Australia. Nothing they did afterwards matched its success – Len’s next biggest song on Spotify is an earlier single called Candy Pop, which was a minor hit in their home country.
2. Michael Sembello
Hit: Maniac (1983). Streams: 603,310,676
Miss: Automatic Man (1983). Streams: 473,569
Secondary success rate: 0.08 per cent
Michael Sembello is probably the real “winner” of this silly data dive and has the most played song in the top 10. Sembello played with Stevie Wonder and wrote songs for Michael Jackson prior to co-writing and recording this hit single for the film Flashdance. Maniac is an Oscar-nominated US chart-topper that reached #2 in Australia, and has appeared in about 80 films and TV shows since. Immediately after the success, Sembello said he wanted to “let (the song) die”, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon, with Maniac clocking up 600 million plays and counting. His next biggest song, outside of a re-recording of Maniac, is Automatic Man, a minor hit in America from the same album.
1. Tommy Tutone
Hit: 867-5309/Jenny (1981). Streams: 109,480,514
Miss: White Flag (2023). Streams: 11,284
Secondary success rate: 0.01 per cent
There’s a big asterisk next to this one, which only goes to highlight the futility of this exercise. Tommy Tutone, real name Thomas Heath, had a top five hit in the US with 867-5309/Jenny, and it reached #22 in Australia. But most of Tommy Tutone’s back catalogue isn’t on Spotify – in fact, the original recording of 867-5309/Jenny isn’t even on the platform, and his 110 million streams for the song come from two similar mixes of a re-recorded version of the 1981 hit. Five of his albums aren’t on Spotify either, so his second biggest song on the streaming platform (not counting a Christmas version of 867-5309/Jenny called Santa Jenny) isn’t his 1980 US top 40 single Angel Say No, but rather an idiosyncratic cover of Dido’s White Flag, which has just over 11,000 hits.
And because it would be a shame to let all this incredible data go to waste, here’s 11-20:
11. Starland Vocal Band – Afternoon Delight
12. The Archies – Sugar, Sugar
13. OMC – How Bizarre
14. Carl Douglas – Kung Fu Fighting
15. Looking Glass – Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl)
16. Zager & Evans – In The Year 2525
17. Patrick Hernandez – Born To Be Alive
18. The Swingers – Counting The Beat
19. The Buggles – Video Killed The Radio Star
20. Wild Cherry – Play That Funky Music
This story was first published by the ABC.