The Goo Goo Dolls are a case where our measure deserves a clear caveat. The Buffalo rock band have had a long, hit-filled career, with multiple major singles across the late 1990s and 2000s, and no one who lived through that era would call them a one-hit wonder.
But "Iris", written for the 1998 film City of Angels, exists on another level. A soaring, open-tuned ballad, it became one of the defining songs of its decade and has aged into a streaming giant, sitting near 3.3 billion plays.
The rest of the catalogue is real and beloved, with "Slide", "Name", and "Black Balloon" all genuine hits in their time. Even so, dividing "Iris" by their second biggest streaming track, "Slide", gives a ratio of about 7.4, past our 5.0 line.
So by our strict, numbers-only measure, the Goo Goo Dolls register as a certified one-hit wonder. We flag it as exactly the kind of result our threshold is meant to surface honestly: a genuine multi-hit band whose single most enormous song has pulled far enough ahead, on streams alone, to tip the maths.