Aphex Twin has unexpectedly overtaken Taylor Swift in monthly YouTube listeners, pulling in nearly 450 million across YouTube’s ecosystem. The artist behind the name is Richard D. James, a British electronic music producer widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in experimental and ambient electronic music.
This past week, new data released from YouTube Music shows the 54-year-old electronic producer is currently attracting more monthly listeners across YouTube’s ecosystem than Swift, 36, a disparity that puzzled fans, given her unbeaten track record and her unparalleled success in touring, album sales, and mainstream streaming.
© Photo by Andy Willsher/Redferns/Getty ImagesAccording to DJ and content creator RamonPang, who highlighted the figures, Aphex Twin is drawing between 438 million and 448 million monthly listeners across YouTube Music, Shorts, and standard video streams, compared with Swift’s reported 396 million to 399 million. So how did this artist get more listens than the Queen of pop?
How Aphex Twin has overtaken Taylor Swift on YouTube:
The main driver behind Aphex Twin’s rise is his 2001 track QKThr. This ambient, accordion composition is from his album Drukqs. Despite running just one minute and 27 seconds, the track has become a widely used audio clip across TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, where it frequently accompanies emotional, reflective, or surreal video edits.
RamonPang said he has seen the track used in everything from postmodern corecore edits about the internet to meme content and hopecore videos, describing the song as “emotional and soul-crushing” because of its distinctive accordion melody. He also questioned whether younger users might one day feel nostalgic for a piece of music released years before they were born.
© Erika Goldring/TAS24YouTube Music’s monthly listener metric , unlike Spotify or Apple Music, includes passive listens that occur when music plays in short-form videos, even if viewers are not actively seeking out the artist or pressing play. This means that a song used repeatedly in viral clips can dramatically inflate an artist’s monthly listener total, even if that artist does not have a massive mainstream audience. These metrics led to an increase in his song's QKThr presence across millions of short videos.
This is how Aphex Twin was able to surpass
Swift and reach extraordinary play levels, illustrating how visibility on YouTube can be shaped as much by algorithmic reuse as by deliberate listening. And while it may seem strange that this electronic musician exceeds one of the world’s pop singers, it also highlights the shift in how music circulates online and the impact viral audio clips can have on audiences.
Resident Advisor, an authority on dance/club culture explains the phenomenon
Interestingly, there is another incident linking the two artists. Aphex Twin and Taylor Swift briefly intersected in 2023, when a pressing error mistakenly replaced copies of Swift’s Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) with an electronic compilation featuring Aphex Twin. Videos of confused fans quickly spread online, offering an unexpected cultural crossover between two vastly different musical worlds.
