Alka Yagnik demands the firmest caveat of almost anyone in this database. She is one of the most prolific and successful playback singers in the history of Indian cinema, with thousands of recordings across decades, and she has been named the most-streamed artist on YouTube in the world. By no sane definition is she a one-hit wonder.
But this database measures Spotify streams, where one song so dominates her presence that the maths is unavoidable. "Agar Tum Saath Ho", the aching ballad from the 2015 film Tamasha, composed by A.R. Rahman and sung with Arijit Singh, is among the most-streamed Indian songs ever, and it dwarfs the rest of her vast Spotify catalogue. It now sits near 695 million plays.
Her countless other recordings trail far behind on that platform. Dividing the hit by her second biggest gives a ratio above 7, past our 5.0 line.
So by our strict, numbers-only measure, on Spotify, Alka Yagnik registers as a certified one-hit wonder. We include it purely to expose the method's blind spot: a singer with one of the largest bodies of work in popular music, whose listening lives largely on other platforms, reduced by one streaming service to a single song.