Owing to the recent popularity of his 2001 track “QKThr” on TikTok, Aphex Twin’s monthly YouTube streams have outpaced those of Taylor Swift.
Aphex Twin‘s influence has reached far beyond electronic music, with members of bands like Linkin Park and Red Hot Chili Peppers having cited him as an inspiration. But he’s not the cultural force that he was around the turn of the millennium, which makes it all the more surprising that he’s surpassed Taylor Swift in monthly YouTube streams.
When you type his name into search on the platform’s YouTube Music service, it says that Aphex Twin (real name Richard James) boasts 438 million monthly monthly streams at the time of writing. That’s 42 million more than Swift, whose monthly streams currently sit at 396 million.
Why the upset? Los Angeles DJ and content creator Ramon Pang suspects that the recent viral popularity of James’ 2001 track, “QKThr,” is the culprit. The one-and-a-half-minute piece of music has become a mainstay of “subtle forshadowing” videos on TikTok, a trend in which flashes of a “fail” at the end of a clip are edited into the seconds leading up to it. And while the upload itself has only amassed 7.6 million plays on YouTube music, the track itself is thought to have garnered far more from being incorporated into YouTube Shorts, which follow a similar format to TikTok.
Originally born in Ireland, James starting producing music at age 14 and began DJing at free parties in Cornish by 1988. His first music release was 1991’s Analogue Bubblebath via the label Mighty Force, but it was Selected Ambient Works 85–92 via R&S Records imprint Apollo Records that made him a household name in the rapidly exploding world of electronic music.
It bears mentioning that James’ YouTube resurgence will more than likely prove to be temporary. Swift is currently YouTube’s third most-streamed artist of all time at 43.5 billion views, trailing just behind Bad Bunny at 45 billion. James’ uploads themselves currently sit at 108 million.
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