Opus were an Austrian rock band who, after years of work at home, captured lightning in a bottle with a single live recording. "Live Is Life", released in 1985 and famously taped at a concert celebrating the band's tenth anniversary, was a chanting, crowd-powered anthem, and its singalong chorus turned it into a massive pan-European hit and an enduring fixture of sports stadiums everywhere.
The band had a long career in Austria and kept performing for decades, but to the wider world they exist entirely through that one communal, fist-in-the-air chorus.
On streaming, "Live Is Life" sits near 331 million plays, and nearly all of their other top tracks are alternate versions of the same song. No separate track comes close. That sends the ratio near 11, far past our 5.0 line.
By our measure Opus are a certified one-hit wonder. Theirs is a classic story of an anthem outgrowing its makers: a song built around the sound of a crowd singing along, so perfectly suited to terraces and celebrations that it took on a life entirely its own, leaving the band that recorded it remembered, almost everywhere, for that one euphoric chant.