He dropped out of school and started DJing at the X-Base backpackers on Magnetic Island, paying his fare over from Townsville weekly in return for a bunk for the night and breakfast in the morning.
“I was paying for knowledge,” he says. “I wanted to be around it, see what people were listening to. And I found that house was the universal sound most people would dance to. So I’d go back to Townsville, try to make more house music, I’d suck at it, I’d never play it. And then, you know, fast-forward six years and I’m all right at it.”
He’s “all right” enough that his remix of American heavy metal act Disturbed’s cover of Sound of Silence (yes, the Simon and Garfunkel song) topped the end-of-year chart, his remix of Teddy Swims’ The Door was at 18, and his collaboration with Dean Lewis on Fall At Your Feet was at 24.
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Spotify won’t reveal how many streams any individual track has had, but collectively the top 30 clocked up 1.8 billion streams globally.
On Instagram in early December, Riley posted that his tracks had been streamed 839 million times in 2024, a figure he estimates climbed another 10 million or so by year’s end.
That equates to decent coin. At around 0.4 cents per stream, Riley’s tracks would have generated about $3.4 million in royalties from Spotify alone. (The money goes to the rights holder, typically a label, and the artist is paid according to the terms of their deal.)
Riley credits nostalgia with setting him on the track to success.
Cyril Riley, aka CYRIL.Credit: Getty Images
He was listening to the radio one day in 2023 when Stumblin’ In, the 1978 track by Suzi Quatro and Chris Norman (lead singer of soft-rock band Smokie), came on. “I used to play that song on guitar, and I was like, ‘I need to remake this’,” he says.
He laid down the base of his remix, he claims, “in 15 minutes”. The final track took a couple more days. For the video, he splashed $400 on lights from K-Mart, put on the bucket hat (a gift from his brother-in-law) that has now become his trademark, and wandered around a deserted mansion with a Harry Potter goblet (“I love Harry Potter”) from his mother-in-law.
“I put all that in the video,” he says. “And then, you know, Bob’s your uncle, mate.”
Indeed it is. That song has had more than 500 million streams, and Cyril Riley is stumbling into a life that would once have been unimaginable … on fast-forward.
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