Darude is a Finnish DJ and producer who made one of the most recognisable instrumental dance tracks of all time. "Sandstorm", released in 1999, is a relentless, build-and-drop trance anthem with a riff that almost everyone knows, even if they cannot name it, and it became a massive club hit across the world.
Its second life has been as an internet phenomenon: "name the song" jokes turned "Sandstorm" into a long-running meme, with the title offered as the punchline answer to almost any music question online. That endless recirculation has kept it enormous on streaming.
Nothing else Darude made came close. "Sandstorm" sits near 598 million plays, while his next most-streamed track, "Feel the Beat", trails at around 53 million. That sends the ratio above 11, far past our 5.0 line.
By our measure Darude is a certified one-hit wonder, and a gloriously meme-fuelled one. His is a classic trance-era story given an internet twist: one wordless, instantly recognisable anthem that conquered the clubs and then found a second, ironic immortality online, leaving everything else he made far behind. Being the answer to a long-running joke has, paradoxically, kept the track more alive than ever.