One-Hit Wonders, 538 Style

[stoutfellow]

538 has put together a list of the most popular one-hit wonders played on classic rock stations. The definition, I must say, is idiosyncratic. I mean:

Joan Jett? (OK, I know nothing about Joan Jett, but I know that I know nothing, which says something. Ish.)

Toto? ("Hold the Line"? What about "Africa" or "Rosanna"?)

The Guess Who? ("American Woman" isn't even their best song; I wouldn't put it in the top five, actually.)

The Hollies? ("Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress"? It's a great song, but they did the original of "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother"!)

I'll concede on Manfred Mann (although there's always "The Mighty Quinn", which was the model for the first filksong I ever wrote). I'll grudgingly concede on Derek & The Dominos, too; "Layla" was probably their only big hit, but Clapton's been going strong ever since.

I dunno. My list would include Climax ("Precious and Few"), Brooklyn Bridge ("The Worst That Could Happen"), and Looking Glass ("Brandy"), but I don't control anybody's playlist, so I guess I don't count.

Comments

[sraun]

It makes sense from the point of view of their data analysis - these groups only had one song that showed up on the classic rock playlists in their data set. When I read their write-up, it sounded like they were amused by it - they're claiming that these are the songs that these artists are being actively remembered for.

[stoutfellow]

I occasionally teach a GenEd statistics course, and one of the topics is measurement: is what you're measuring actually relevant to what you're trying to measure? Some divergence from what seems intuitively right is legitimate (and interesting), but this is "off" enough that I'd say they chose the wrong tool - or the wrong description for what they were trying to measure.

(Among other things, I'm not sure that "gets airtime on classic rock stations" equates to "is actively remembered", especially nowadays.)