Brazilian funk has made waves in the global music industry. Where does it go from here?

What has a photo spread in National Geographic, an exclusive deal with Twitch, a Netflix original series, a Spotify playlist with 200,000 followers and a corresponding editorial feature, interest from the likes of Drake, Diplo and Snoop Dogg and one of the top 10 most-subscribed YouTube channels in the world?

It’s Brazilian funk — also known as funk carioca — which has grown over the past few decades into one of Brazil’s best-known music styles and pop-culture exports.

Drawing inspiration from American hip-hop styles like Miami bass and gangsta rap, funk carioca developed on the margins of Brazil’s mainstream cultural industry in the mid- to late 1980s through a network of parties in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Since then, it’s expanded into a near-fully professionalized, Internet-powered economy across Rio, São Paulo and other Brazilian cities, and has continued to fuel local political movements.

Through technology, funk carioca helped a large part of the country’s traditionally excluded population express themselves and, importantly, make money from their stories. In fact, the evolution of funk carioca bears stark resemblance to that of hip-hop in the U.S., with a political and commercial context that is unique to Brazil.

And despite its rapid growth in recent years, funk carioca also faces many of the same challenges that comes with the professionalization of an underground musical movement — namely, prioritizing long-term artist development over just churning out hits, and navigating the power imbalance between artists and the curators who bring them to market.

Funk’s early origins in Rio

The history of funk carioca begins in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in the 1980s, with key artists like DJ Marlboro, MC Marcinho and the group Copacabana Beat laying the sonic groundwork for the genre years before the invention of the World Wide Web.

Pre-Internet, the careers of funk carioca DJs and MCs were split between the two halves of Rio: The music was produced in the favela, but it was played in nightclubs scattered throughout the city, from the often poorer North Zone — which was dismissed by the media — to smaller nightclubs in the wealthier South Zone that drew much more coverage.

“I played in poor neighborhoods for ten to fifteen thousand people per dance, but there wasn’t one mention in the newspaper, nor on T.V. or radio,” DJ Marlboro tells me. “Whereas a show at a 200-cap nightclub in the South Zone had all the visibility.” Only a handful of funkeiros (funk artists) managed to break into the mainstream media in this time, including MCs Cidinho e Doca and Claudinho e Buchecha in the 1990s and Tati Quebra Barraco, Bonde do Tigrão and Serginho e Lacraia in the 2000s.

As the internet matured, however, well-known DJs and MCs from the favelas no longer needed to play at elite dances in richer neighborhoods to become popular outside of their own home turf. Funkeiros appropriated all possible means to promote their music online — even if it meant encouraging piracy. Artist pages on the now-defunct social networking site Orkut often contained links to recordings hosted by file-sharing and storage services like RapidShare, Megapuload, 4shared and Soulseek.

Thanks to the power of social media as well as independent blogs, successful record labels like Furacão 2000 emerged at the turn of the century. But no matter how popular these MCs were, their financial gain was still restricted to in-person dances, rather than online music sales. “The artists made no money from streaming at the time,” Renato Martins, music researcher and founder of the label Funk na Caixa, tells me. “Some sites even charged artists to host their songs.” At the time, according to research by the Getúlio Vargas Foundation, the entire funk carioca economy — spanning payments for MCs, DJs and sound crews and entrance fees to dances — generated just under $2 million in sales per month.

São Paulo and the power of YouTube

This narrative changed dramatically in the early 2010s, with the rise of entrepreneurs in São Paulo investing in music videos on YouTube as a vehicle for financing and professionalizing the funk carioca scene.

It’s hard to overstate how important YouTube has become for music and media consumption in Brazil. As of 2017, 95% of the Brazilian population with Internet access visits YouTube at least once a month. According to MIDiA research, nearly 80% of people in Brazil watch music videos on YouTube, a larger proportion than those who listen to the radio or stream music. In general, Brazilian pop stars account for eight of the top 10 most-viewed concert livestreams of all time on YouTube by number of concurrent viewers. The current winner is sertanejo artist Marilia Mendonca, whose pandemic-induced livestreamed event in April 2020 drew 3.3 million concurrent viewers at its peak.

Given that Brazil is also home to one of the largest commercial T.V. networks in the world (Rede Globo), music discovery in the country is highly visual and dependent on music videos, a trend that has translated to the digital and Internet realms as well.

Around 2011 to 2012, funk carioca was facing a generational and creative crisis, in that not many successful artists were emerging at the time. “There were some hits [in Rio de Janeiro], but just a few, nothing that would be capable of sustaining an entire movement,” says Martins.

In contrast, the sound of funk that began to come out of São Paulo embraced a wholly different style known as ostentação (ostentation), which became known for music videos and lyrics about conspicuous consumption and wealthy lifestyles. And interestingly — unlike in Rio, where most artists distributed music to websites that allowed free downloads (like funkneurotico.net) — artists in São Paulo began uploading songs to YouTube instead and investing more in their audiovisual presence online.

This lay the foundation for the birth of KondZilla, one of the best-known funk labels and production companies out of Brazil. KondZilla was founded in 2011 by Konrad Dantas, a former web designer born in the small town of Guarujá, near São Paulo. At the age of 18, he bought a Canon 5D Mark II camera with the money he received from his mother’s life insurance payment, and decided to move to São Paulo to study cinematography. There, he found a market for recording and marketing higher-quality music videos for funk artists in the ostentação style, starting first with MC Primo (for the song “Espada no Dragão“).

More importantly, because Dantas focused on YouTube for distribution, his videos were actually generating money for himself and for artists. “At the time, the CPM [on YouTube ads] was very high,” Martins tells me. “Artists that got tens of millions of views on YouTube [through KondZilla] started injecting money into the funk movement that was never seen before.”

Today, KondZilla is one of the 10 most-subscribed YouTube channels in the world, with over 59 million subscribers; according to Billboard, around 30% of its views now come from outside Brazil. The company also has full professional support for music monetization, from distribution deals with The Orchard and OneRPM to a global administration deal with Universal Music Publishing Group. Beyond recordings, KondZilla has expanded into a production partnership with Netflix (for the series Sintonia), an artist agency and an accessories brand. Dantas is widely considered one of the key players responsible for funk’s global expansion.

And competition is heating up, with other YouTube channels like GR6 (30 million subscribers and a distribution deal with Warner Music Brazil), Detona Funk (7.3 million subscribers) and Love Funk (2.3 million subscribers) releasing their own records and videos, alongside a whole range of smaller, self-organized news and gossip channels that are helping to drive the conversation around the genre. In June 2020, the rapper MC Mirella switched her production company from GR6 to KondZilla Records in a transaction worth $1 million — showing on the one hand the substantial amount of money that funk is moving in the industry, and on the other hand the degree of professionalism achieved by São Paulo producers.

For the most part, the new funk economy has remained independent, with most artists in the scene opting to sign with KondZilla, GR6 or Love Funk rather than any of the three major labels directly. The few who do go the major-label route — such as Anitta (Warner Music), Nego do Borel (Sony Music) and Ludmilla (Warner Music) — ultimately lean more towards mainstream pop, with lyrics that are less favela-centric and sounds that blend more deliberately with other styles including EDM and reggaeton.

Future challenges: Financial sustainability and artist development

The actual financial sustainability of these operations is another question entirely.

According to the IFPI, ad-supported streams — including but not limited to YouTube — account for only around 9% of all digital music revenue in Brazil. This presents a challenge for channels like KondZilla, whose rapid growth in the mid-2010s has slowed down significantly in recent years.

For example, in July 2019, Billboard reported that KondZilla was raking in over a billion monthly views on YouTube, making between $1 million and $1.6 million a month from the video platform alone. One year later, monthly viewership has plummeted by more than 50%, from 1 billion monthly views to under 500 million monthly views as of July 2020, according to SocialBlade.

GG Albuquerque, a journalist and researcher specializing in funk at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), tells me that KondZilla’s music video production department (KondZilla Filmes, as distinct from KondZilla Records) has been reporting financial losses for around two years. “YouTube has greatly reduced its monetization, so [profit] no longer comes from YouTube views, but rather comes from advertisements and brand partnerships,” says Albuquerque.

In 2018, both KondZilla and GR6 were collectively responsible for 30% of the videos in YouTube’s top 100 chart by viewership; in 2019, that share dropped to 12%. Moreover, a new generation of successful artists from Rio de Janeiro — including DJ Iasmin Turbininha, DJ Rennan da Penha and DJ FP do Trem Bala, who popularized the 150BPM style (literally funk music with an accelerated tempo of 150 beats per minute) — have opted to upload their music to their own YouTube channels instead of relying on third parties. Spotify has also become a major, monetizable distribution channel for the genre, as funk was the most-consumed style on the platform in Brazil last year.

Even though the growth of YouTube brands like KondZilla and GR6 is slowing, they still wield immense influence over music promotion and artist discovery. This makes it difficult for independent artists to break into the scene, as the producers who dominate likes and views on YouTube also control the production and promotion of music content in the genre. KondZilla in particular has chased funk production on an industrial scale, releasing dozens of music videos every month from a diverse range of artists, all fighting to break through the noise and develop their own, long-term fan bases.

In general, this has encouraged a focus from producers on constantly churning out individual singles and music videos, rather than developing larger repertoires or longer-term careers for artists. Many of these songs also sound similar to and then cannibalize each other — the natural outcome of aspiring stars trying to copy a successful artist’s style, which limits the movement’s innovation and creativity and ends up leaning too heavily on a few successful acts to sustain the entire structure of record labels, shows and bailes in the scene.

While this is slowly starting to change with companies like KondZilla investing more in 360 artist deals and international partnerships, there also remains a larger bifurcation between underground funk that uses popular slang from the favelas and more “explicit” language, and a commercial, “sanitized” version of funk that seeks bigger markets.

For example, larger labels like KondZilla don’t allow swearing, so artists are often forced to make one version of a song for the bailes da favela and another, “lighter” version that can be played on mainstream media. “Funk is no longer [exclusively] from the favela, it has become pop — and that has limited the movement,” says Martins.

The arrival of streaming services like Spotify in Brazil have partially helped liberate artists by allowing them to bypass such gatekeeping and filtering practices. “‘[This music] is played a lot at the baile? Then let’s make a light version to play on the radio,’” DJ Iasmin Turbininha, one of the main proponents of 150BPM funk, tells me, explaining how a conversation would normally go down with a label. “But nowadays with the Internet, funkeiros have many more opportunities to disseminate their work [without holding back].” Turbininha has direct experience with these kinds of barriers, having faced sexism for being one of the first female funk DJs and homophobia for being openly LGBT.

This widening gap between underground and commercial funk has made it even more difficult for artists to transition from one market to the other, especially given that funk in Rio de Janeiro has a long history of criminalization and persecution of artists. Many of the favelas remain controlled by either state military police or separate paramilitary organizations, and today bailes only happen with the permission of these groups. In fact, it wasn’t even until 2009 that the Rio government passed a law designating funk as a “musical and cultural movement of popular character,” and prohibited discrimination or prejudice against the funk movement and anyone associated with it. Even still, some funkeiros like DJ Rennan de Penha have been criminalized and arrested in recent years for alleged links with drug trafficking in the favelas of Rio.

New funk markets are beginning to open up across Brazil, including in Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre and Recife, meshing the original sounds of funk carioca with more traditional and regional musical styles. However, local artists in these markets still struggle to create their own market and value their work in competition with artists brought in from the Rio-São Paulo axis. An artist in Porto Alegre today earns approximately what a Rio-based MC earned 10 years ago.

With its proven ability to adapt and reinvent itself over time, funk continues to present an opportunity not just to change the lives of many young people in poor communities throughout Brazil, but also to achieve even more international success thanks primarily to the work of independent labels. That said, the scene’s largely underground economy also means that many artists struggle to access advice and resources for building and maintaining longer-term careers.

This is especially true in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, where Brazil is second only to the U.S. in the number of reported deaths. Most of the bailes and live shows that were an important source of income for the funk scene have been suspended, although there are reports of illegal dances still happening across the country, including in Rio and São Paulo. In the meantime, funkeiros are continuing to release their own music videos on YouTube, and are also investing more in other platforms like TikTok, whose usage in Brazil grew by over 300% year-over-year in 2019.

As the style continues to attract more audiences and professionalize itself with the help of technology, it’s important that it doesn’t lose its essence and move away from its roots.