The 2010s are the decade that the streaming era was built on. Spotify went global. Apple Music launched. YouTube and SoundCloud minted careers, then TikTok did again, faster. The shape of a hit changed: instead of a song dropping, peaking, and fading, a 2010s track could simmer in playlists for years, then catch a screen placement or a meme and double its play count over a single summer. The decade produced 146 certified one-hit wonders in our database, and the top 20 by total streams reads like a tour of every way a 2010s song could blow up.
Methodology. Every artist on this list has a hit song released between 2010 and 2019, cleared our ratio of 5.0 (their hit outstreams their next song by at least five times), and crossed at least 50 million plays. The ranking is by total streams on the hit. Several of these acts have deeper catalogues than the one-hit label suggests; that caveat lives on each artist's page.
The Top 20
1. Lord Huron: "The Night We Met" (around 3.68 billion plays). A spectral 2015 indie-folk ballad given an enormous second life by 13 Reasons Why, then a third one by TikTok.
2. Vance Joy: "Riptide" (around 3.59 billion). A ukulele-led 2013 anthem that has refused to leave wedding receptions, coffee shops, and supermarket playlists since.
3. Tom Odell: "Another Love" (around 3.50 billion). A 2012 piano ballad that found its biggest audience nearly a decade later, when TikTok turned it into protest soundtrack and breakup-edit fuel.
4. Tones And I: "Dance Monkey" (around 3.42 billion). An Australian street busker's bizarrely catchy 2019 vocal performance that broke chart-longevity records around the world.
5. John Legend: "All of Me" (around 3.04 billion). Strict caveat: a Grammy-stacked singer with a long catalogue. On streams, the 2013 wedding ballad sits a long way ahead of everything else.
6. French Montana: "Unforgettable" (around 2.86 billion). Featuring Swae Lee. A 2017 dancehall-tinged rap-pop crossover that became the streaming-era summer-song template.
7. Passenger: "Let Her Go" (around 2.78 billion). A delicate 2012 acoustic ballad that became one of the decade's most-streamed songs.
8. Lucenzo: "Vem Dancar Kuduro" (around 2.49 billion). Featuring Don Omar. A 2010 European-Latin dancefloor smash, ratio in the 40s, still huge a decade on.
9. Foster The People: "Pumped Up Kicks" (around 2.43 billion). A breezy, troubling 2011 indie-pop song whose lyric continues to provoke arguments online a decade and a half later.
10. Gotye: "Somebody That I Used to Know" (around 2.41 billion). Featuring Kimbra. The Australian art-pop singer's 2011 breakup duet became the defining indie crossover of the early streaming years.
11. WALK THE MOON: "Shut Up and Dance" (around 2.31 billion). A 2014 pop-rock burst of 80s-flavoured energy that has powered every gym, every wedding, every advert since.
12. The Walters: "I Love You So" (around 2.30 billion). A Chicago indie band's 2014 album cut that quietly turned into a TikTok phenomenon years after release.
13. SAINt JHN: "Roses (Imanbek Remix)" (around 2.15 billion). A 2019 remix that turned a moody original into a Grammy-winning slap-house global hit.
14. MAGIC!: "Rude" (around 2.08 billion). A 2013 Canadian reggae-pop song that hit number one in the US and faded almost as fast as it arrived.
15. Bastille: "Pompeii" (around 2.01 billion). A 2012 indie-pop history lecture with a "eh, eh-oh" hook that turned the band's debut into a global hit. Strict ratio: just above our line.
16. Offset: "Ric Flair Drip" (around 1.95 billion). Strict caveat: he is a Migos member. As a credited lead, this 2017 single with Metro Boomin dwarfs the rest of his solo work.
17. Milky Chance: "Stolen Dance" (around 1.93 billion). A 2013 German indie-folk-rock single that turned its bedroom-acoustic charm into a worldwide hit.
18. Trevor Daniel: "Falling" (around 1.86 billion). A 2018 emo-rap-tinged ballad that became a TikTok mainstay across 2019 and 2020.
19. Capital Cities: "Safe and Sound" (around 1.83 billion). A bright, brass-blasted 2011 indie-pop-rock hit that has scored more film trailers than anyone has thought to count.
20. Pharrell Williams: "Happy" (around 1.73 billion). Strict caveat: he is Pharrell. On his own solo billing, "Happy" runs so far ahead of everything else that the ratio crosses our line.
What this tells us about the 2010s
The 2010s rewrote what "one hit" can mean. Time-shifted virality is the headline story. Six of the top 20 here had their biggest streaming moment years after their original release: Lord Huron, Tom Odell, The Walters, Beach House, Trevor Daniel, Djo. The song dropped, lived quietly inside playlists or soundtracks, then a TikTok trend, a TV show, or a streaming algorithm pulled it back into the spotlight. That pattern barely existed in earlier decades, and it now produces some of the largest play counts in the database.
The other big shift is genre flattening. The top 20 swings cleanly from indie folk (Lord Huron, Vance Joy, Passenger, Milky Chance) to TikTok-era rap (French Montana, Offset, Trevor Daniel, SAINt JHN) to indie pop (Foster the People, Gotye), pop-rock (Walk the Moon, Bastille), dance crossover (Lucenzo, SAINt JHN), reggae-pop (MAGIC!), and contemporary R&B (John Legend, Pharrell). The decade did not have one sound. It had every sound, and streaming counted them all on the same leaderboard.
It is also worth noticing what is not on this list. A handful of huge 2010s singles by acts with deeper catalogues (think Mark Ronson, Sia, Lewis Capaldi) sit just below our line because their second-biggest song is too healthy to be called a one-hit wonder. Borderline cases like Foster the People, Bastille, and Beach House squeak past the 5.0 mark with caveats. The 2010s pushed more "is this really a one-hit wonder?" cases into our database than any other decade, mostly because streaming made every artist's catalogue measurable in real time for the first time.
For the decade before, see The Greatest 80s One-Hit Wonders, Ranked and 90s One-Hit Wonders You Still Know Every Word To. To browse the full set, see all 2010s one-hit wonders.