If you’re a fan of the one-hit wonder phenomenon, look at this.
Sometimes an artist will have a single hit only to disappear forevermore. But is there a science to the one-hit wonder? This scientific paper takes a look. It’s pretty nerdy (I love it!) but it helps with OHW scholarship. (Via Trevor)
“TL;DR: I got annoyed that the standard definitions of a one hit wonder are terrible or nonexistent, so I spent 30+ hours manually collecting Spotify playcount data and analyzing thousands of artists to create a formula for measuring one hit wonderness.
“The core theory is that a one-hit wonder is not defined by how popular its biggest song is, but by how popular its second biggest song is relative to the first. (One Hit Wonder Score (OHW) = biggest song streams ÷ second biggest song streams) After analyzing the data, I discovered that artists with an OHW score above 15 almost always align with what people intuitively consider “true” one-hit wonders, so I named this threshold The Baha Line after Baha Men, whose song “Who Let the Dogs Out” landed just above the threshold with a score of 15.1. The current dataset contains 422 artists above the Baha Line, which have also been scientifically ranked to determine the greatest one-hit wonders of all time.”
