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the grid ✚ #004: Feid, 6YNTHMANE, Luan Santana, Haze, Peso Pluma

the grid ✚ #004: Feid, 6YNTHMANE, Luan Santana, Haze, Peso Pluma

Chris Slade
December 14, 2023

cousin.world is a regular newsletter on global music.

Each week, I’ll update one of the following playlists with 10 ascendant tracks from global markets and provide analysis to explain how they’re breaking:

run ⇡ — club tracks from euro & UK dancefloors
cherry soda ⚭ — breaking k/c/p-pop, city pop and indie
the grid ✚ — sounds of urbano, reggaeton, funk
magnitude △ — afrobeat, dancehall and amapiano rising

Today’s grid ✚ is about “phonk”, Feid, sertanejo, ‘Hola Cookie’ and so much more. This playlist serves to highlight tracks coming from Latin markets with a particular focus on funk and reggaeton.

For anyone still reading their emails next week, magnitude △ #004 will be the final mailer of the year, covering afrobeat, dancehall and amapiano goings-on!

Thank you for reading and see you then 💌

the grid ✚

1. Feid, Young Miko — ‘CLASSY 101’ (Colombia/Puerto Rico)

Feid’s new album FERXXOCALIPSIS came out on December 1st and he’s currently the 58th most-streamed artist on Spotify.

31-year-old Feid has been releasing music since 2014, starting out between two key moments in the reggaeton timeline: Daddy Yankee’s ‘Gasolina’ (2004) and Luis Fonsi’s ‘Despacito’ (2017). The latter is arguably responsible for forcing the global music industry to build the required infrastructure that now allows reggaeton, and perhaps all non-english-language music, to thrive all over the world. Artists like Feid and his collaborators — Karol G, Bad Bunny, J Balvin, Maluma and so on — all came up on this wave and are now regularly closing years out as the biggest streamers on earth.

Young Miko, on the other hand, released her debut Trap Kitty EP in 2022 and first single ‘Freestyle 105’ in 2021. Despite only being active for two years, she already has 28m monthly streamers on Spotify, 6m followers on Instagram and has collaborated with many of the artists listed above, including a big mainstream US pop play with Marshmello.

‘CLASSY 101’ is one of three streaming hits Feid is currently in play with, alongside Bad Bunny’s ‘PERRO NEGRO’ and another track from this album called ‘LUNA’ ft. ATL Jacob.

2. 6YNTHMANE, RXDXVIL — ‘BRAZILIAN DANÇA PHONK’ (Poland)

A new mega-streaming genre has emerged online called “phonk” and, as usual, there is some debate over who started it and what it is.

The first explanation is that phonk originated in the 90s in Memphis, Tennessee downstream of Memphis rap and hip hop, as local DJs began to experiment with harder, darker beats. Others will tell you phonk is short for drift phonk and was started in the late twenty-teens in Russia to soundtrack weightlifting videos.

The final explanation is that phonk takes its name from Brazilian baile funk, which makes the most sense to me considering the similarities in sampling, repetitive lyrical refrains often in Portuguese and the overall funk-y vibe. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the genre has been all three of these things at different times — please do feel free to reply and educate me!

There are a few interesting things about the genre. The first is that although it often takes its cues from Brazilian funk, it’s a totally international movement. A cursory look at Spotify’s own phonk (7.1m followers!) playlist reveals that today’s genre figureheads are from markets as scattered as Ukraine, Finland, Argentina, Israel, Russia and the USA. Even a track like ‘BRAZILIAN DANÇA PHONK’, which has 113m streams on the platform, was created by a producer from Warsaw, Poland called 6YNTHMANE. Whatever its official point of origin, today’s phonk is mostly an online affair.

Another significant thing about the genre is that is that it streams like crazy. Hours-long mix videos are clocking millions of views on YouTube every day, while on Spotify there’s an entire playlist ecosystem generating billions of streams on these tracks. Notice the uniform branding and anime aesthetic which is prevalent across pretty much all related content as well as the activities the music is supposedly designed to soundtrack: working out and gaming.

Whatever you think of the music, phonk is a great case study on how genres are forming and disseminating today. Its 2023 iteration has everything you need to create a mega-viral genre: a cohesive aesthetic, a predetermined purpose for listening and an engaged, global community of contributors.

3. Luan Santana, Ana Castela — ‘Deja Vu’ (Brazil)

This is the latest single from Luan Santana, a major Brazilian artist who just released the 12th album of his 14 year career last month. ‘Deja Vu’ is a collaboration with Ana Castela, a comparatively much newer artist who has taken off in the last two years off the back of a smash hit or two.

Sertanejo is the biggest genre in Brazil and is analogous to US country music in terms of style, demographic and popularity. Great research about the genre has been published by Leo Morel on Chartmetric, which you can read here. Within he highlights a really interesting relationship between sertanejo, Brazilian radio and the country’s influential agricultural sector.

Despite coming up as a sertanejo artist herself, Castela’s profile exploded last year on the back of a mega-viral pop track called ‘Pipoco’, a collab with teen pop artist Melody (who released her first single at eight years old) and DJ Chris no Beat.

‘Deja Vu’ is currently at #2 on Spotify’s Top 50 Brazil and most likely heading to #1.

‘Hola Cookie’ is a new one from Puerto Rican artists Haze, Brray and Juanka.

This track is out via House of Haze, Haze’s own imprint under an independent distributor called Cinq Music Group. In fact, all three of these artists are signed to different independent distributors (Brray is signed to GLAD Empire LLC and Juanka to Superiority).

There are currently a huge number of players competing to sign Latin artists. Cinq was founded in 2012 and won Latin Label of The Year at the Billboard Music Awards in 2016, so they definitely had a head start. Since then there has been an influx: InGrooves hired a specialist Latin team in 2019, TuneCore launched in LATAM in 2021, HYBE bought Exile Music this year, and so on.

If you have Billboard premium, you can check out this interesting piece on what’s happening in music distribution in the region and how companies are bending over backwards to sign these stars.

5. Peso Pluma, Anitta — ‘BELLAKEO’ (Mexico/Brazil)

This collab between the star of the regional Mexican wave Peso Pluma and Brazil’s biggest export Anitta came out last week.

Anitta has a nose for smart collabs, helping her reach across genres like funk, reggaeton, mainstream pop and even k-pop to extend her audience. Given that regional Mexican music is the latest boom genre in the region, it’s unsurprising to see this.

In a Billboard piece about Peso Pluma’s breakout song ‘Ella Baila Sola’, writer Griselda Flores notes that 35 regional Mexican tracks have entered the Hot 100 this year. Two years ago there were zero.

Elsewhere in the piece is this great quote from Spotify’s Mexico editorial lead Uriel Waizel: “The biggest lesson regional Mexican music has taught is that the ‘traditional’ format had to make concessions to impact the U.S. and global charts,” Waizel says. “Which is what we saw happen with Rema and Selena Gomez [with “Calm Down”]. It’s a great example of music that becomes more digestible for global audiences.”

+ Five More…

6. Chefin, Mainstream, LB Único — ‘10 Carros’ (Brazil)

‘10 Carros’ is a big track from Brazilian artist Chefin. It’s currently in the top 5 daily and weekly streaming charts in both Brazil and Portugal.

7. Feid, ATL Jacob — ‘LUNA’ (Colombia)

From the aforementioned new album, this is the second massive track Feid is currently in play with which leads Spotify’s biggest reggaeton playlist Baila Reggaeton (11m followers).