Lady Gaga, Colby O'Donis — Just Dance

Gaga's debut single is broadly charting across 141 country and platform charts today, riding the sustained commercial momentum of her Mayhem era. Released in April 2008 as the lead single from The Fame, the track was co-written by Gaga, RedOne, and Akon — a club-pop blueprint so clean it charted in over 30 countries on its original run and won a Grammy nomination for Best Dance Recording. The song has maintained a long afterlife in live performance, most visibly at the Super Bowl LI halftime show, where Gaga played it on keytar mid-set to 111 million viewers. It also features in Just Dance 2014 and its successor titles, giving it a steady generational refresh through the game franchise that shares its name. Eighteen years on, the track functions less as nostalgia than as pop-music infrastructure — the kind of debut that defines a before-and-after in a genre.