M.I.A. reached a mass audience almost by accident. "Paper Planes" was released in 2007 to modest attention, then appeared in the trailer for Pineapple Express and on the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack, and climbed to number four on the US Billboard Hot 100 a year after release.
It remains her biggest track at around 1.06 billion streams. But "Bad Girls", the 2012 single with the much-imitated video shot in Morocco, sits past 520 million on its own, and "Bucky Done Gun", "Borders" and "Sunshowers" all have long-standing audiences.
That gives a ratio near 2, well below our 5.0 line. The second song is doing about half the work of the first, which describes an artist with a following rather than a single crossover moment.
So M.I.A. is not a one-hit wonder by our measure. She has five studio albums, a Mercury Prize nomination and an Academy Award nomination for "O... Saya", and her influence on the sound of late-2000s pop runs well past her own chart positions. "Paper Planes" is simply the one that escaped into films, adverts and sampling and never came back.