Name some one-hit wonders. Go on, do it. What names come to mind? The Knack? Soft Cell? Los del Río? What about the Baha Men? We could go on for hours, but what was the first single to go straight into the charts at number one?
That honour, The Conversation notes, belongs to Whigfield and her 1994 single ‘Saturday Night’, when it displaced Wet Wet Wet’s 15-week stay at the top with ‘Love is All Around’. The UK singles chart launched in 1952, so it took over 40 years for such a phenomenon to occur.
The previous decades had been marked by artists and their management teams attempting to build momentum and utilising broadcast media outlets like magazines and TV to slowly but surely push their songs up the charts. Whigfield was the first that didn’t need to.
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But in 2014, the music industry landscape is a very different place. As it happens, the past 12 months saw as many as 14 different acts achieve a number one debut single. That’s 40 years without a number one debut single, fast-forward two decades and we have 14 in a single year.
If you’re thinking to yourself that one-hit wonders seem to be following the same path of exponential growth as technology, you’re definitely onto something there. With the way music is consumed changing each year, chart rules have changed in order to adapt to the market.
In 2005, music downloads were included in the charts for the first time, with Gnarls Barkley’s juggernaut single ‘Crazy’ minted as the first track to reach number one based on downloads alone. In 2014, streamed music was introduced to the calculation of chart positions – 100 streams equals a single sale.
Even the spread of buzz has ramped up. Whereas Whigfield relied on news of the dance routine associated with the song to stir up chatter about ‘Saturday Night’, today marketing departments can use everything from blogs, to the colossus of social media, where information is exchanged at a staggering pace.
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While this means that new artists are able to gain exposure far more rapidly than in previous decades, it’s also had a detrimental impact on the staying power of artists. In 2014, the number one single changed 41 times, with only six tracks managing to maintain their number one position for more than a week.
Taking a look at the charts of the ’50s and ’60s, the number one single changed less than 20 times in a year. The top spot now changes hands frequently with a wider range of artists achieving recognition in a single year, making for a musical turnover never before seen.
If this pace continues, and it most likely will, you can expect 2015 to be marked by artists who arrive from nowhere and then suddenly disappear. More one-hit wonders will come in to fill the void left by the egress of previous performers, making a quick splash, and then sinking or just floating away.
