Photo by Zulfugar Karimov
With an apparent audience topping 400 million, a deep-cut from the early 2000s is driving one of streaming’s strangest stats right now.
Aphex Twin currently boasts more monthly listeners on YouTube Music than global pop titan Taylor Swift, a discrepancy first flagged by DJ and Resident Advisor contributor RamonPang on Instagram on January 15.
According to YouTube Music’s public metrics, the Cornish producer stands at roughly 448 million monthly listeners as of January 16, compared to Swift’s 399 million. The figure, striking as it is, comes with an important caveat: YouTube Music’s “monthly audience” pulls not only from direct plays of official videos, but also from passive usage across YouTube Shorts.
That nuance helps explain the anomaly. While Aphex Twin’s traditional charts show a far more modest 5.10 million listeners, his broader platform presence is being inflated by the persistent virality of ‘QKThr’, a track lifted from his 2001 album Drukqs. The piece has become a go-to soundtrack for a wide range of online edits, from post-modern “corecore” collages and meme culture to hopecore and subtle internet surrealism.
In his analysis, RamonPang suggests the song’s ubiquity could give future Gen Z and Gen Alpha listeners a strange form of nostalgia for a track released years before most of them were born, a reminder of how algorithmic culture can rewrite musical timelines.
It is not the first time Swift has found herself orbiting the world of ’90s IDM and experimental electronica. In 2023, a pressing plant error famously saw copies of her chart-breaking ‘Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)’ mispressed as an Above Board compilation featuring Aphex Twin, Matthew Herbert, The Black Dog, and others, prompting viral clips of baffled Swifties dropping the needle for the first time.
For now, ‘QKThr’ continues its unlikely second life, proving that in the age of Shorts and snippets, even the most abstract electronic music can quietly conquer the mainstream.
Watch RamonPang’s full analysis HERE.
