PublishedFri, Jan 16, 2026, 15:30WordsShareWith an apparent audience of over 400 million, the Cornish producer's 2001 track "QKThr" seems to be behind the virality.Aphex Twin currently has more monthly YouTube listeners than Taylor Swift.

DJ and Resident Advisor contributor RamonPang drew attention to this anomaly on Instagram yesterday, January 15th, highlighting the fact that the Cornwall producer has outstripped the global pop superstar by tens of millions, based off the stats shown by YouTube's streaming service, YouTube Music.

As of today, January 16th, Aphex Twin's monthly audience stands at 448 million listeners. Swift, meanwhile, is lagging with a paltry 399 million listeners.

A quirk of YouTube Music's reporting means that the monthly audience is drawn not only from direct plays on videos connected to official artist accounts, but also the passive use in YouTube Shorts. Aphex Twin's charts show 5.10 million listeners—still impressive, but someway below the half-billion mark.

RamonPang believes Aphex Twin's eye-catching numbers stem from the enduring virality of "QKThr," taken from the electronic icon's 2001 album Drukqs. The track is cited as the background music for a vast array of videos, such as "postmodern corecore edits about the internet, stupid meme videos, subtle foreshadowing and hopecore," among other things.

In his analysis, RamonPang also pondered if the ubiquity of the track means that Gen-Z and Gen Alpha listeners will feel nostalgic for "QKThr" in decades to come, despite most being born many years after Drukqs.

It's not the first time that Swift has been mentioned in the same breath as '90s IDM and electronica greats. A pressing plant mix-up led to her record-breaking 2023 album Speak Now (Taylor's Version) being mispressed as an Above Board VA compilation featuring Aphex Twin, Matthew Herbert, The Black Dog and others, resulting in comical footage of confused Swifties playing the record for the first time.

Listen to "QKThr," and watc