Tom Cochrane is a Canadian rock musician, well known at home both as a solo artist and as the frontman of Red Rider, who wrote one of the most enduring driving anthems of the 1990s. "Life Is a Highway", released in 1991, is an exuberant, harmonica-spiked rock song built for the open road, and it became an international hit, later reaching a whole new audience through a cover used in the film Cars.
Cochrane has had a long, decorated career in Canada, but to listeners elsewhere he is almost entirely defined by that one joyous anthem.
On streaming, "Life Is a Highway" sits near 200 million plays, while his next most-streamed track trails at around five million. That sends the ratio above 38, far past our 5.0 line.
By our measure Tom Cochrane is a certified one-hit wonder outside Canada, with the caveat that he is a celebrated, long-serving artist in his home country. It is simply that one irresistibly upbeat road song travelled far beyond the rest of his catalogue, carried further still by a film cover, and on streams it now stands well ahead of everything else he recorded.