A Great Big World are an American pop duo, Ian Axel and Chad King, whose career crystallised around one devastating ballad. "Say Something", a spare, aching piano song, first appeared in 2013 and then went stratospheric when Christina Aguilera joined for a duet version, sending it around the world and to the top of the charts.
The pairing made the song a fixture at talent-show finales and emotional montages everywhere, and the collaboration was honoured with a Grammy. The duo kept writing, with songs like "Kaleidoscope" finding modest audiences, but nothing else approached that breakout, and the spare piano ballad remains their defining work by a distance.
On streaming, "Say Something" sits near 1.2 billion plays, while their next most-streamed track trails at around 43 million. That puts the ratio near 28, far past our 5.0 line.
By our measure A Great Big World are a certified one-hit wonder. It is a familiar modern route to the label: a quiet song lifted to enormous scale by a superstar feature, after which the act that wrote it is remembered, above all, for that single shattering ballad.