Half of the top ten are songs everyone knows by artists no one remembers.
By a strict textbook rule, a one-hit wonder is any act with only one Top 40, which is how Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead ended up in the same category as the Baha Men.
But the user decided that it needed to be fixed. He spent more than 30 hours collecting Spotify Playcount data for hundreds of artists, then wrote a methodology paper that answers this question with deadpan rigor. The traditional explanation, he writes, “comes from a scientific point of view, nonsense.”
They created instead a single formula ranking of 422 artists, and at the top of the list is a song that only people know how to dance to.
422 Musicians, Number one
For 422 artists, the ranking turns hit-wonder status into an average: Spotify’s biggest single by an artist divided by their second biggest song. Anyone above the 15-point line is eligible, as long as their top song has more than 10 million streams and the artist has at least three singles released.
This formula applies the same test to Christmas perennials, classic rock songs, new dance tracks, and various Internet hits, with no adjustments for genre, seasonal weight, or extra credit for cultural significance.
It’s a big list, but here’s a closer look at the entries you should stick with.
It’s a song with a huge one-hit wonder effect
A song that peaked at number 83 on the Billboard Hot 100 would normally not have topped in any situation. But DJ Casper’s Cha Cha Slide sits at number one because the formula ignores chart position, and streaming numbers tell a story no chart has ever taken.
Cha Cha Slide has over 120.5 million Spotify streams. DJ Casper’s second most popular single, “Not You,” has 2,434. Separate one from the other and you get a One-Hit Wonder (OHW) score of 49,533.3, which is 11.6 times higher than the artist ranked second on the list.
That gap makes the song sound more like a hit song than a social instruction book.
DJ Casper wrote the song in 1998 for his nephew, who is his trainer at Bally Total Fitness in Chicago. So since gym class, it’s been a song that wedding DJs, school principals, and stadium announcers all independently decided was the one track everyone knew the moves to.
Hits are bigger than their artists
Even among the top ten, the list begins to produce names that do not register at all next to songs that everyone knows.
For example, Gayla Peevey ranks number seven with an OHW score of 721.6. He recorded “I Want a Hippo for Christmas” at age ten, and decades of holiday playlists have made the song more recognizable than his name.
The song now has 152 million Spotify streams, all driven by modern Christmas listening rather than anyone treating Peevey as a catalog artist.
Other entries show the same disparity between song recognition and artist recognition:
- The Buggles sit at number 54 with “Video Killed the Radio Star,” a song that launched MTV.
- Stealers’ Wheel hits number 62 with “Stuck In the Middle With You,” a track now inseparable from Reservoir Dogs.
- Toploader’s “Dancing in the Moonlight” has nearly 1.2 billion streams, but the group’s second single has enough listeners to keep its rating at 162.1.
“I had to scroll to #134 Rusted Root before I found a group where I heard more than one song,” wrote one Redditor.
Artists who didn’t qualify despite the big hits
Overall, no entry better demonstrates how little popularity matters than Masked Wolf.
“Astronaut In The Ocean” has 1.56 billion Spotify streams, yet Masked Wolf comes in at No. 415 with just 15.5 OHW points, nearly clearing the survey. He spread a billion and a half, and the formula almost left him on the list.
Meanwhile, Billy Ray Cyrus qualified at No. 402 with a 16.2 despite decades of subsequent country success and a daughter who became more popular than “Achy Breaky Heart.” Under the numbers, the hit still dominates his catalog enough to put him on the list.
And just down the line, the numbers get even more controversial as Alex Clare scored a 14.99, missing the mark by a hundred points with “Too Close” at 254 million streams, and Travie McCoy scored a 14.7 with “Billionaire” at 902 million streams.
Both attracted audiences that neither chart could see as hits, but the artists’ second singles drew enough listeners to hold a rating below the cutoff. But in these margins, the formula stops confirming what people have already heard and starts making calls they want to contradict.
The formula behind the One-Hit Wonder range
As SloppyJoe47 ranked the artists, he found that those above 15 “almost universally feel like bona fide wonders,” while those below tend to have a second track that’s noticeable enough to weaken the case.
He decided to call this line the “Baha Line,” as he was inspired by the Baha Men, whose “Who Let the Dogs Out” scored a 15.1 and was a near perfect borderline.
To qualify, an artist’s best song needs more than 10 million Spotify streams and the artist needs at least three singles released. All versions of the song were covered, from remixes and radio arrangements to acoustic recordings and foreign language releases.
And because Spotify doesn’t publicly release global play stats, all the numbers had to be manually compiled from the desktop app.
But the points themselves are straightforward. Divide the number of plays for the most popular Spotify song by the number of plays for the second most popular song, and the resulting number is the OHW score. A high score means that one song completely dominates the catalog. Every artist who clears 15 gets a ranked position on the list.
SloppyJoe47 is not the first to bring statistics to this question. The project sits on a long history of trying to define a slick pop-culture label, including:
Where Science Breaks Down
The sharpest criticism of the formula came from Redditor pruo95, who pointed out the difference the formula didn’t account for.
AA-Ha shows why that difference is important. “The Sun Always Shines on TV” spent two weeks at number one in the UK, as Redditor RunDNA pointed out. By any chart-based definition, that’s a second strike.
On Spotify, however, it doesn’t quite register against “Take On Me,” so the formula pushes A-Ha into acts that don’t have a comparable second single.
But the problem gets messier when the list starts comparing songs from different eras.
“It doesn’t work in all eras, especially when streaming wasn’t a thing before 20 years ago,” argued Redditor MFoy.
In fact, the song that dominated the radio in 1985 and the song that topped TikTok in 2020 are measured by the same yardstick, and only one of those songs was created by streaming culture.
Redditor atp2112 also pointed out that the group has had multiple top 10 hits and top 40 entries on Billboard, yet the formula still ranks them as one-hit wonders because “Poison” topped their Spotify catalog.
However, instead of backing down from that disagreement, SloppyJoe47 leaned into it. “I like the idea that the data is the driver of the list rather than setting the limits,” he replied.
Therefore, the formula cannot tell you that it is asking the right question. By design, that part is left to the reader.