Ongoing History of New Music

Through the first four episodes of this Top 50 Biggest Alt-Rock One-Hit Wonders of All Time series, we’ve gone through songs 50 to 11, so that means we are ready for the top 10 songs.

If you’ve been following along, there may have been a few surprises along the way…and you may have been trying to guess what songs will finish in the upper regions of this list…now we’re going to find out.

These are the final 10 songs in our countdown.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How does an artist become famous forever with just one song and never come close again?

We continue the countdown of the "50 Biggest Alt‑Rock One‑Hit Wonders of All Time", using five decades of radio charts, Spotify streams, YouTube views, and a specially designed one‑hit‑wonder power ranking.

In part 4, we come across...

A one‑hit wonder that’s also a cover of another one‑hit wonder

Gregorian chants that unexpectedly dominated global charts

A "Major Tom" sequel

A song built on a 1932 trumpet sample and an Atari computer

An anarchist collective that somehow conquered the world

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is Part 3 of the 50 Biggest Alt‑Rock One‑Hit Wonders of all time...numbers 30 to 21 featuring Dishwalla, EMF, Spacehog, Harvey Danger, and more. And of course, the stories behind these one-hit wonders.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our countdown of the biggest alt‑rock one‑hit wonders of all time continues as we break down numbers 40 to 31.

From K’s Choice and Liam Lynch to Animotion, Fun Lovin’ Criminals, The Vapours, and more, these are the songs that ruled alternative radio, slipped into pop culture, and forever defined the artists behind them.

Using chart history, streaming numbers, and a custom One‑Hit Wonder Power Ranking from our friend Walter the mathematician, we investigate how these songs became massive...and why one moment was all they needed.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Something occurred to me the other day: did the person who came up with the term “one-hit wonder” ever come up with anything else that good?

I looked it up… the Oxford English Dictionary traces its origin to about 1914, when baseball was starting to become America’s pastime… it was given to pitchers who held the opposing team to just one hit.

We do know that when Ramon Monzant was pitching for the San Francisco Giants in 1956, he was given that nickname…to be called a “one-hit wonder” was very high praise.

But around the same time, “one-hit wonder” migrated over to the music world and acquired a pejorative ring…in musical terms, a one-hit wonder was an artist who could manage one and only one big song…everything else they might have done was a flop, a stiff, a failure, and was ignored.

Billboard magazine began to incorporate the phenomenon of the one-hit wonder when it came to its charts…their definition was an artist who released just one song to reach the top 40, the realm of “hits” on the singles charts.

But that’s pretty narrow and really only considers songs and artists for that one chart…what about all the other non-top 40 artists who achieved fame for one and just one song?

The more I went down this rabbit hole, the more intrigued I became…was there a way to look at the history of alternative music to determine the biggest one-hit wonders of all time?

There just might be…and after going through a lot of numbers and statistics, I may have cracked it…But I’m going to let you be the judge…This is part one of the 50 biggest all-time alt-rock one-hit wonders of the last 50 years.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices