The full strange story of an ambient takeover: Aphex Twin is now more listened to than Taylor Swift on YouTube
Remember, around the time of Kid A in the early 2000s, when Radiohead couldn’t stop gushing about how much they loved Aphex Twin, and Richard D James responded by saying he didn’t like Radiohead at all, and that he found their music “cheesy”?
Well, that might have seemed a tad mean and petty back in the day, but as it turns out, Aphex Twin isn’t just the begrudging favourite influence of your favourite aughts band; he’s the preferred artist of Gen Z (and maybe Gen Alpha) right here and now, bigger than Bad Bunny, Sabrina Carpenter, and the unsinkable Taylor Swift.
If this information is confusing, that’s for good reason. Based on a comparison of monthly listeners on Spotify, ‘Tay Tay’ has Richard James beat by a count of about 111 million to three million, or roughly 37x the listenership. When you switch the playing field to YouTube, however, things get really weird, as recently observed by DJ RamonPang and communicated to Resident Advisor.
As of January 21st, 2026, according to stats provided directly by YouTube Music, Aphex Twin’s monthly audience was standing at a rather mind-boggling 430m people, ranking the 54-year-old electronic artist a solid 34m listeners ahead of Swift, the world’s most famous pop star.
Have half a billion people suddenly come around to the same epiphany Thom Yorke had back in the day? Sadly not, it seems. While Aphex Twin certainly isn’t fading into obscurity by any means, the real reason for Richard James’ improbable slaying of Swift in the YouTube Music rankings can be attributed to a weird anomaly of sorts in how the platform tallies up its listeners.
According to RamonPang’s hypothesis, the ‘monthly audience’ for an artist is calculated in a more complicated way than one might expect. Clicking the play button on the ‘Come to Daddy’ video is certainly one way to score a point, but in the case of Aphex Twin, the far greater amount of impressions or interactions is coming in passively, through the use of ambient Aphex tracks in YouTube Shorts.
Specifically, as RamonPang soon found by digging a bit deeper, there seem to be many thousands of YouTubers using the 2001 track ‘QKThr’ as ambient video background music. The wordless and mostly melody-less track from Aphex Twin’s Drukqs album clocks in at just one minute and 27 seconds, and kind of sounds like a puppeteer trying to make a marionette play a tiny accordion. No one would confuse it for ‘Bad Blood’ or ‘Shake It Off’, and yet, ‘QKThr’ is apparently one of the most listened to songs on the internet, even if the vast majority of people hearing it would have no idea what the track was or who performed it.
The unusual status of ‘QKThr’ as ubiquitous vid music has gradually impacted its Spotify popularity, too, as it now has over 130m plays compared to well under two million for the tracks immediately before it and after it on Drukqs: ‘Lornaderek’ and ‘Meltphace 6’.
It’s always been possible throughout the history of pop music for a 20-year-old song to unexpectedly find new life thanks to its use in a film or TV show. That type of phenomenon has become far more normalised, and far less predictable, in today’s media landscape, where the dividing lines between old and new, and pop star and ambient artist, are increasingly irrelevant. It may also inspire the next generation of musicians to aim more for stealth hits on YouTube than an actual ‘hit’ in the old-fashioned, hummable sense.
