The Spice Girls are perhaps the single most counterintuitive entry our measure produces, and that demands a loud caveat. They were one of the biggest pop acts of the 1990s, with a long string of number-one singles, a global "girl power" movement, and record-breaking album sales. By no sane definition are they a one-hit wonder.
But streaming flattens that history into one song. "Wannabe", their explosive 1996 debut, remains a cultural lightning bolt, and on streams it dominates everything else they did. It now sits near 1.4 billion plays.
Their other hits are real and many, with "Stop", "Say You'll Be There", and more pulling into the hundreds of millions. Even so, dividing "Wannabe" by their second biggest streaming track gives a ratio of about 6.1, over our 5.0 line.
So by our strict, numbers-only measure, the Spice Girls technically register as a certified one-hit wonder. We include the result mainly as a warning about the method's limits: a band with this many chart-toppers is proof that one streaming-dominant song can badly misrepresent an entire, era-defining career. No ratio could capture what this group meant to 1990s pop.