In the last month, the music artist with the largest audience across YouTube platforms wasn’t Bad Bunny or Taylor Swift. It was Slxughter, a phonk producer. The term probably doesn’t sound familiar, but anyone who’s spent any time on social media has almost certainly listened to it.Maybe it’s better to say “heard it,” since the overwhelming majority of people who consume phonk don’t recognise it as a genre, let alone actively choose it. But it’s constantly playing in the background during YouTube Shorts, TikTok or Instagram Reels. It can sound like electronic dance music, but also hip-hop, trap, funk or a mix of those. It can accompany dance clips, gaming montages, fan edits, workout content, sports highlights, motivational clips and anything aiming to convey high-energy vibes.Quietly making its way as the most popular music on vertical videos, phonk has become the unconscious soundtrack of a generation that spends hours doomscrolling online. And it has earned a fortune for its producers, often teenagers who can create a viral track from their bedrooms and become millionaires through royalties within a matter of months.“I’ve been waiting for this conversation for the past, like, five years,” Kevin Meenan, 43, music trends manager at YouTube, said as an opening statement in a call.
The reason someone like Slxughter has such a huge following on YouTube, Meenan explained, is that the monthly audience is calculated by combining “classic” YouTube views with the listenership on all YouTube platforms, including Shorts. This month, Slxughter’s music reached 981 million unique users, more than twice Taylor Swift’s (394 million) and more than six times Bad Bunny’s (150 million).“Phonk is a sleeping giant,” Josh Mateer, 34, head of A&R at SoundOn, TikTok’s distribution platform for artists and labels, said in a phone interview.
“There is a huge juxtaposition between the volume of internet traffic around phonk and the sort of culture as an underground musical movement.”The roots of the genre date back to the Memphis, Tennessee, rap scene of the late ’80s and ’90s, when producers like Tommy Wright III and Three 6 Mafia began defining a raw, sinister sound marked by heavy bass, eerie lyrics, cowbells and hypnotic loops. By the end of the 2010s, Russian and Eastern European producers entered the scene.
Tyler Blatchley, 41, co-founder of the phonk label Black 17 Media, was working at Sony at the time. In Dec2020, he heard an obscure track by Russian producer Kaito Shoma on TikTok and recognised some Three 6 Mafia lyrics. He contacted the group’s DJ Paul and cleared the song for monetisation. It was the beginning of what is called drift phonk (from its use in clips of drifting cars) and the genre’s explosion on social platforms.Today, Blatchley lives in a villa with a pool and basketball court one hour’s drive from Miami. “We don’t even know how to pronounce half of them,” he said. “These kids are producers that work out of their bedroom from all over the world, and they’re watching the algorithm to see what’s popular on vertical video, and then they’re adjusting the kind of music that they make accordingly.”The latest iteration of phonk is so-called Brazilian phonk. Initially dubbed Automotivo phonk, it got confused with Brazilian “funk,” an older genre with authentic Brazilian roots. It is this branch of phonk – more aggressive than drift, but in some cases more danceable – that pushed Slxughter to the top of the charts.
