Hana

The biggest check of Wiz Khalifa's career came from a hook a 23-year-old jingle writer wrote in 10 minutes about his own dead friend. Charlie Puth was an unknown songwriter in 2015 when the Furious 7 team asked for a Paul Walker tribute. Puth had lost his friend Vail in a similar accident. He sat down at the piano, sang "it's been a long day without you, my friend," and the demo vocal he recorded that day is the one you hear in the final song. The label originally planned to replace him with a bigger name. The song spent 12 weeks at #1 and became the best-selling song of 2015 worldwide at 20.9 million units. In 2017 it passed Gangnam Style to become the most-viewed video in YouTube history. It sits above 6 billion views now, with another 2.5 billion streams on Spotify. Here's the part that actually makes Wiz set for life. Normal hits decay. A typical #1 loses most of its streaming volume within two years as playlists move on. See You Again never decayed, because it became the default goodbye song. Funerals, graduations, memorial videos, retirement montages. Every week produces a fresh supply of people who need it, so demand renews itself forever. Wiz is credited as a writer, which means he collects on the publishing side and the recording side every time that happens. He recorded his verses over a decade ago. The check still arrives every quarter, and the song's own use case guarantees it always will.