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 in the past few years 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 recognize 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 video 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 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. It re-emerged in the 2010s with lo-fi productions and gritty themes; SpaceGhostPurrp is credited with popularizing the spelling “phonk.”
“What’s cool to me is how that regional sound, which was originally on physical tapes, got discovered by internet producers thousands of miles away,” the D.J. and producer Diplo, 47, wrote in an email. “Young producers on SoundCloud or YouTube weren’t just sampling Memphis; they were giving it a new context by feeding it to the algorithm.” (Diplo recently released his own phonk album, tellingly titled “D00mscrvll.”)
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 December 2020, he heard an obscure track by the Russian producer Kaito Shoma on TikTok and recognized some Three 6 Mafia lyrics. He contacted the group’s DJ Paul and cleared the song for monetization.
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, particularly via TikTok clips associated with “alpha male” culture.
Blatchley and Black 17 signed most of the first wave of drift phonk pioneers. One of them, Hensonn, was 22 when his track “Sahara” began gaining traction online at the end of 2021. Like most phonk songs, “Sahara” opens with a dark riff that slowly crescendos to build tension, then suddenly adds heavy bass. It’s the ideal structure for edits with a short lead-in, where the drop of the track is often used to boost the climax of the video.
From the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, he had started practicing music production at 15. “I learned everything on my own. I spent years watching tutorials,” he wrote in an email. (Like many phonk producers, he preferred not to use his real name.) “Memphis became such a strong inspiration because of the raw emotion and authenticity of that sound.”
When the track started spreading on TikTok, “It felt surreal. I didn’t expect that level of reaction,” he wrote. It’s only kept growing. According to Black 17 data, the song has more than 24 billion streams on TikTok, making it one of the most recognizable phonk tracks ever.
“I also call it ‘music that you’ve probably never heard of, but you’ve almost certainly heard,’” Lucy March, 34, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied phonk for years, said in a phone interview.
Hensonn didn’t want to share how much he earned from “Sahara,” but songs with similar numbers have netted their creators millions. “I have some guys that have made over $5 million from their music,” Blatchley said.
When Memphis rappers were recording their music on cassettes in the 1990s, they probably didn’t expect that their bars would be listened to trillions of times all over the world 35 years later. Black 17 data show that its top 250 songs piled up more than 1 trillion streams. Its most listened to artist, the Kazakhstan-based Eternxlkz, has more than 109 billion streams alone. Over the past five years, Black 17 has paid out over $140 million to creators on its roster. “I think for them, it was cool to sample these Memphis rappers and kind of create these songs that didn’t sound like they were coming from Russia,” Blatchley said.
Today, Blatchley lives in a villa with a swimming pool and basketball court one hour’s drive from Miami. “We don’t even know how to pronounce half of them,” he told me of his stable of artists during a visit earlier this month. “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.”
In his home office, a photograph hangs on the wall next to several platinum and gold records. It shows Blatchley and his two additional founders sitting on a staircase with 14 producers from Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The picture was taken in Dubai in 2023, where Black 17 organized a reunion with its artists. Recounting their stories, Blatchley estimated that more than half of them are millionaires now. Most of them were between 18 and 21 at the time.
“They all kind of had their own sound,” he said, a small bust of Socrates and a Magic: The Gathering card displayed on his desk. “Where I can’t say the same about the new generation of phonk. They just want hits and they just want money.”
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.
Moving on from its social media roots, phonk is trying to make its way into the mainstream. At the beginning of 2026, Black 17 released the full version of Diplo’s “D00mscrvll.” “There’s menace, melancholy, bravado, you name it. It’s not just background music that gamers love, it’s a mood for a life lived always online,” wrote Diplo, whose album is a homage to the different iterations of phonk.
“I was thinking about what phonk means about our collective attention, anxiety and identity in the present day,” he added. “If phonk is the unconscious soundtrack of the doomscroll generation, then ‘D00mscrvll’ is just my postmodern brain-rot canvas to hold that soundtrack still long enough to examine it.” Last year, Diplo introduced phonk elements in “Like Jennie,” the hit he produced for the K-pop star Jennie.
“I feel like the music industry missed phonk,” Blatchley said at his villa. “They didn’t think these people were career artists. They didn’t think any of these guys could ever make a million dollars off music, and the last five years have shown they were very wrong.”
The post The Soundtrack of the Doomscroll Generation? It’s Phonk. appeared first on New York Times.
