Vance Joy is the Australian singer-songwriter James Keogh, and "Riptide" is his calling card. Released in 2013, the ukulele-driven, rapid-fire love song became one of the most-streamed indie-folk tracks of the decade, the kind of festival singalong that refuses to fade.
What makes Vance Joy an interesting case is how close he sits to the edge of our definition. He is not a textbook one-hit wonder with a single towering spike and nothing else. "Mess Is Mine" and "Georgia" have both pulled in hundreds of millions of streams, real hits by most measures.
But "Riptide" is simply enormous. It sits near 3.6 billion plays, while "Mess Is Mine", his next biggest, trails around 644 million. That puts the ratio at about 5.58, just over our 5.0 line.
So by our measure Vance Joy is a certified one-hit wonder, but only just, and the verdict is finely balanced. A single strong release could nudge him back under the threshold. For now, one ukulele riff carries enough weight to tip the scales, even with a couple of genuine hits sitting behind it.