Last month, the artist with the largest audience on YouTube wasn’t Bad Bunny or Taylor Swift. This is Slxughter, a phonk producer. The term may not sound familiar, but anyone who spends time on social media has almost certainly heard of it.Perhaps “heard” is a better word, since the vast majority of people who consume Funk’s music don’t recognize it as a genre, let alone actively choose it. But it will keep playing in the background during YouTube Shorts, TikTok or Instagram Reels. It can sound like electronic dance music, or it can sound like hip-hop, trap, funk, or a mixture of these. It can accompany dance clips, gaming montages, fan edits, workout content, sports highlights, inspirational clips, and anything else designed to convey a high-energy vibe.Quietly becoming the most popular music in vertical video, phonk has become the unconscious soundtrack for a generation that spends hours scrolling online. It made a fortune for producers, often teenagers, who could create a viral song in their bedroom and become millionaires through royalties within months.“I’ve been waiting for this conversation for five years,” Kevin Meenan, 43, YouTube’s music trends manager, said in his opening remarks on the call. Meenan explained that the reason someone like Slxughter has such a huge following on YouTube is that monthly viewership is calculated by combining “classic” YouTube views with listeners across all YouTube platforms, including Shorts. This month, Slxughter’s music has 981 million unique users, more than twice that of Taylor Swift (394 million) and more than six times that of Bad Bunny (150 million).“Phonk is a sleeping giant,” Josh Mateer, 34, head of A&R at SoundOn, TikTok’s artist and label distribution platform, said in a phone interview. “There’s a huge juxtaposition between the internet traffic surrounding phonk and the culture of the underground music movement.”The genre’s roots can be traced 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, menacing sound characterized by heavy bass, eerie lyrics, cowbells, and hypnotic loops. In the late 2010s, Russian and Eastern European producers joined the effort. Tyler Blatchley, 41, co-founder of phonk label Black 17 Media, was working at Sony. In December 2020, he heard an obscure song by Russian producer Kaito Shoma on TikTok and recognized some of the lyrics to “Three 6 Mafia.” He contacted the band’s DJ Paul and approved the song’s monetization. This was the beginning of so-called “drift music” (derived from its use in drift car clips) and the explosion of the genre on social platforms.Today, Blatchley lives an hour outside of Miami in a villa with a swimming pool and basketball court. “We don’t even know how to pronounce half of them,” he said. “These are kids from all over the world working in their bedrooms, using algorithms to understand what’s popular in vertical video and then adjusting the type of music they make accordingly.”The latest version of phonk is the so-called Brazilian phonk. It was originally called Automotivo phonk, confused with Brazilian “funk,” an ancient genre with authentic Brazilian roots. It was this offshoot of phonk – more aggressive than drifting, but in some cases more danceable – that propelled Slxughter to the top of the charts.
