Artists who manage to have only one hit are often the butt of jokes…getting tagged as a one-hit-wonder can kill your career…but let’s turn this around: how many hits do you have?...

There is so much music out there, so much competition for our attention, that if you managed to break through all the noise just once, that should be considered a giant victory…

And remember, too, that thanks to streaming and the tens and tens of millions of songs available at our fingertips through our smartphones, that today’s artists are not only competing with their contemporaries but with essentially humankind’s entire recorded musical history…

So, yeah…being a one-hit-wonder is a genuine accomplishment…and while you may burn brightly and then quickly fade, it is possible that one song is all you need to set you up with some royalty cheques for the rest of your life…at the very least, you’ll end up as a trivia question…

Some of these acts are gone forever…others have moved on to other things…and others still just keep plugging away, hoping that lightning strikes twist…

Here are the stories of some alt-rock artists who hit it big exactly once…

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Great Alt-Rock One-Hit Wonders of the 90s: Part 1