RTS.FM's Own Data Shows Why 2009 Still Wins

We pulled every video off youtube.com/@rts_fm on September 27, 2026, using the YouTube Data API, and sat down with the results instead of guessing. The channel's public stats show 3,895 uploads; the API returned full metadata for 3,865 of them (the gap is likely private or deleted videos), with 10,675,313 lifetime views between them and 38,200 subscribers behind the channel itself. That is not a small archive. It spans two decades of DJ sets, studio broadcasts, and festival showcases recorded across RTS.FM's non-commercial studio network, and it gave us the chance to ask a question we'd genuinely never answered with numbers before: which era of our own catalog actually gets watched?

The headline is blunt. Sets we can date back to 2009 average 10,207 views each, a figure no other year comes close to touching, and one that dwarfs anything recorded in the last five years by a factor of 4 to 12. That is not a rounding quirk or a single viral outlier skewing an average (though there is a viral outlier in there too, and we'll get to it). It holds up across 221 separate sets. This piece walks through what the data shows, where it's shaky, and what it might mean for how an archive like ours should think about its own back catalog.

Upload Date vs. Recording Date: Why the Distinction Matters

YouTube only tells you when a video was uploaded, not when the set inside it actually happened. For most channels that distinction barely matters. For RTS.FM it matters enormously, because 2,550 of our 3,865 videos, roughly two-thirds of the entire channel, were uploaded in a single year: 2013. That was not 2,550 new sets recorded in 2013. It was a mass migration, older recordings dug out and backfilled onto YouTube in one long push. Judged purely by upload date, 2013 looks like our biggest year ever, with 6,569,071 total views. Judged by what was actually performed, 2013 barely registers, because almost everything uploaded that year was recorded earlier.

That's why we went back into 1,918 of the 3,865 video titles, just under half the catalog, and parsed the dd.mm.yyyy date most of our older uploads embed directly in the title (a habit from the channel's early years that turns out to be a genuine gift for this kind of analysis). Recording year, not upload year, is the more honest lens for asking what actually resonates.

What Does the Recording-Year Data Actually Show?

Here's the full breakdown, sets by the year they were recorded, average views per set, sorted chronologically:

Two years jump off that table immediately for the wrong reasons: 2012 (7 sets, avg 484 views) and 2015 (8 sets, avg 3,547 views) are samples too small to generalize from, and we're flagging that explicitly rather than pretending they tell us anything. Note also that 2013 barely appears in this cut at all, because that year's uploads were almost entirely the backfill of pre-2013 recordings already counted under their real years above.

What's left after discounting the tiny samples is a real, stable pattern: 2009 sits at 10,207 average views per set, more than double 2008 (7,249) and 2010 (3,393), the years immediately on either side of it, and 4 to 12 times higher than every single year from 2022 through 2025 (2,246 to 2,938 average). That is not noise. That is 221 sets, recorded across a full calendar year, consistently outperforming everything recorded in the last five years.

What's Actually Driving the 2009 Number?

Part of the answer is one specific video. The single most-viewed upload in RTS.FM's history is Nina Kraviz's set recorded on 31.10.2009, uploaded in 2013, and sitting at 1,053,490 views, nearly six times the next entry on the all-time list. That one video alone accounts for close to half of 2009's total view count. If you're the kind of reader who wants to strip it out and eyeball the rest of the year, do that math yourself; the takeaway that 2009 still leads doesn't depend on any single video, but it's fair to know how much weight one set is carrying.

The rest of the top 20 tells a similar story about that window of RTS.FM's history. Nine of the twenty most-viewed videos on the entire channel were recorded in 2009 or 2010, including Motor City Drum Ensemble's 24.10.2009 studio set at 185,254 views (RTS.FM covered that scene's ongoing pull in our piece on Movement Detroit turning twenty), Kevin Yost's 03.05.2009 set at 176,803, and Rick Wade's 12.12.2008 set at 98,647. These are not sets that went viral last month and happen to be old. They're sets that have been quietly, steadily accumulating views for over a decade.

Is This Nostalgia, a Head Start, or Both?

Here's where we have to be careful not to claim more than the data supports. There are two honest explanations for why 2009 wins, and they're not mutually exclusive.

The first is a genuine "golden era" effect: people specifically seeking out early, formative underground sets from artists who've since become much bigger names, Nina Kraviz chief among them. A set recorded before an artist's rise carries a different kind of curiosity value than a set recorded after.

The second is simpler and less romantic: older videos have had more years to accumulate views. Our age-bucket breakdown supports this partly, videos 8 to 10 years old average 5,148 views, 10 to 12 years old average 6,457, a fairly steady climb with age. But it doesn't fully explain the 2009 spike. If accumulated time were the whole story, 2008 (an even older recording year) should out-view 2009, and it doesn't; 2008 averages 7,249 against 2009's 10,207. Something about 2009 specifically, not just "old," is pulling extra weight.

The honest conclusion is that it's probably both, with the Nina Kraviz set doing outsized work inside the 2009 number specifically. We don't have the data to cleanly separate "people love finding old gems" from "old videos simply had more time to rack up views," and anyone telling you they can fully untangle those two forces from view-count data alone is overselling their analysis.

What Does This Mean for Archive-Holding Channels?

If you run a channel with real history behind it, the practical lesson isn't "record more sets in 2009," obviously. It's that catalog depth is a genuine asset, not just a nostalgia trip, and it rewards patience over chasing upload-day spikes. A set recorded during a scene's formative years, hosted somewhere people can still find it, keeps earning views a decade later in a way that most current uploads, averaging 2,000 to 2,800 views in recent years by comparison, simply don't match yet. Whether they eventually will is an open question our own data can't answer until enough time has passed.

That's the same logic behind why Resident Advisor's own 25-year archive is treated as an institution rather than just a backlog, and it's the case for outlets like RTS.FM staying independent and artist-run: nobody else is going to keep a studio-network archive like this one alive, or care enough to go back and actually read it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many videos does RTS.FM's YouTube archive actually contain?

The channel shows 3,895 uploads in its public stats. A full pull via the YouTube Data API on September 27, 2026 successfully retrieved metadata for 3,865 of them; the small gap likely reflects videos that have gone private or been deleted since upload.

Why does 2013 show 2,550 uploads if the channel wasn't that active that year?

2013 was the year a large portion of RTS.FM's older recordings were migrated onto YouTube in a single backfill push. The upload date reflects when a video was digitized and posted, not when the set was actually performed, which is why we parsed recording dates out of video titles separately.

Is the 2009 view-count lead just because of one viral Nina Kraviz video?

Partly, but not entirely. That single set, recorded 31.10.2009, accounts for a large share of 2009's total views at 1,053,490. But 2009 still leads on a per-set average basis across 221 sets, and nine of the all-time top 20 most-viewed videos were recorded in 2009 or 2010, so the pattern isn't resting on one video alone.

Can this data tell us whether it's nostalgia or just a head-start effect?

Not conclusively. The age-bucket data shows older videos generally average more views, which supports a head-start explanation. But 2009 still out-performs the older 2008 recording year, which a pure age effect wouldn't predict. Both nostalgia-driven rediscovery and accumulated time are plausible contributors, and this dataset can't fully separate them.

How reliable is the recording-year breakdown compared to the upload-year numbers?

The recording-year data only covers the 1,918 of 3,865 titles (about half) where a dd.mm.yyyy date could be parsed directly from the title text, so it's a subset, not the full catalog. Some recording years in that subset, notably 2012 and 2015, have very small sample sizes (7 and 8 sets respectively) and shouldn't be read as meaningful trends on their own.