Aphex Twin beats Taylor Swift on YouTube thanks to “QKThr”

The overtake you didn't see coming: Aphex Twin is currently pulling in more monthly listeners on YouTube than Taylor Swift. An unpredictable stat that's got the music industry talking.

The experimental producer from Cornwall – according to Nme – currently tallies around 448 million monthly listeners on YouTube Music, against the American popstar's 399 million. The figure comes from a metric that aggregates overall activity on YouTube: not just audio streams on YouTube Music, but also views of official music videos, user-generated content and, above all, "passive" listening through YouTube Shorts.

It's this last point that largely explains Aphex Twin's surge. Over the past few months, his 2001 track "QKThr" has gone viral, ending up as the backing track for a huge number of short-form videos. Several observers, including DJ RamonPang, have pointed out how this cross-platform spread has had a direct impact on the spike in his numbers. The comparison between Aphex Twin and Taylor Swift isn't new on a symbolic level either, as Nme also points out. Back in 2014, artist and writer David Rees released "AphexSwift", a mash-up album that put the two worlds in dialogue, arguing that Richard D. James and Swift shared more creative common ground than one might think.

In recent years, Aphex Twin has kept up an intermittent, scattershot release schedule. After the 2024 compilation "From The Merch Desk (2016-2023)", he surprise-released two new tracks on SoundCloud this past November. Before that, an expanded edition of "Selected Ambient Works II" had also come out to mark the album's 30th anniversary. His last proper studio album remains the Grammy-winning "Syro", from 2014.

In 2025, attention has mostly shifted to his collaborations with the Supreme brand, including a lengthy playlist personally curated by the British artist.

Taylor Swift, for her part, continues to dominate the traditional charts. Last October she released her twelfth album, "The Life Of A Showgirl", which turned out to be the UK's best-selling album of the year. A milestone that made her the first artist since Abba in 1977 to top the sales charts for two consecutive years with different albums.

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