FlipMusic, the production house behind “Pantropiko,” started in 2009 as two bandmates with a home catalog and a plan to share their music until somebody paid attention.
Those two were Jumbo De Belen and Pow Chavez. Before they had a company name, De Belen had been producing at home for years and had built up a large catalog. He was giving much of it away for free. By 2011 they formalized the operation with Jeli Mateo, who handled the business side and eventually became CEO. Within the first year they had an office and a fully equipped studio. By August 2021 the FlipMusic catalog stood at 2,327 songs.
In 2006, three years before any of that, Chavez competed on the first season of Philippine Idol and finished in the top five. Judge Pilita Corrales called him “idol material.” A year later he was excluded from a singing competition in Malaysia because of transphobia.
He is a trans man, and his advocacy has been public since at least 2011, when he collaborated with Amnesty International Philippines on a human rights campaign. He also joined the University of the Philippines dragon boat team in 2009, the same year he and De Belen started planning FlipMusic. Today he is the vocal coach of VVINK, the girl group Angelika Sam leads.
Nica del Rosario, FlipMusic’s head writer, composed “Tala” for Sarah Geronimo, and De Belen produced it. During production he sped up the original tempo, turning a slower song into the track that sparked a dance craze when social media rediscovered it years after its release. “Pantropiko” followed a similar arc: released in November 2023, it peaked at number three on the Spotify Philippines Viral Chart and debuted at number thirty-eight on the Spotify Global Viral Chart, then sat for months before TikTok carried it into summer.
The dance that spread the song started as a dare. Sheena Catacutan, BINI’s main dancer, was challenged by dance coach Mickey Perz to build a routine for the track. She developed it with coaches Matthew Almodovar and Reden Blanquera. That choreography became the version people filmed on beaches and construction sites across the country.
A clip of construction workers performing it on a job site went viral in April 2024. Anne Curtis joined the challenge. Former Miss Universe R’Bonney Gabriel did too. From South Korea, Red Velvet’s Irene picked up the routine from a BINI fan video.
The Philippine women’s national volleyball team, Alas Pilipinas, danced it on the court after winning bronze at the 2024 AVC Women’s Challenge Cup in Manila, a tournament the Philippines hosted. Players Eya Laure and Sisi Rondina led teammates in the routine. That bronze was the country’s first podium finish at a continental volleyball event, and the Philippine Senate honored the team with a resolution.
In June 2024, Jollibee unveiled BINI as the new endorser of its Cheesy Yumburger line, with a forty-seven-second ad built around a reworked version of the song. A year later, in June 2025, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong used “Pantropiko” as background music for the TikTok he posted about his state visit to the Philippines.
“Pantropiko” debuted on the Billboard Philippines Songs chart at number seventeen on March 23, 2024, climbed to number five by April 20, and reached number one on the chart dated April 27. Weeks later, on July 1, Billboard Philippines discontinued that chart entirely to relaunch it as two new ones. By year’s end the song ranked number three on both the annual Billboard Philippines Hot 100 and Top Philippine Songs tallies. Google listed it as the ninth most-searched song in the Philippines for 2024.
Awards followed. “Pantropiko” won Song of the Year at both the Myx Music Awards and the P-pop Music Awards in 2024. At the Awit Awards it took the People’s Voice Favorite Record and Song of the Year. When Billboard Philippines launched The Official Philippines Chart in February 2025, the song was named one of the top five Local Songs of the Year.
The music video was filmed at Inflatable Island Beach Club in Zambales, a floating waterpark on the coast northwest of Manila, and it passed a hundred million YouTube views by February 2025. The Talaarawan EP that holds the song came out on March 8, 2024, timed to coincide with International Women’s Day. All six tracks were built during the same FlipMusic songwriting camp, and three were released as singles. The EP was certified Platinum by PARI and pushed BINI to become the most-streamed female OPM act on Spotify.
Angelika was a senior at CIIT College of Arts and Technology in Quezon City, a private school focused on digital arts, when De Belen invited her into the songwriting camp. Before VVINK’s official debut on July 10, 2025, at Club Hype in Quezon City, FlipMusic released a pre-debut album with two solo tracks from each member. Angelika’s were “Ningning,” an electro-pop single she released in May 2024, and “Alon,” which draws on an 80s-inspired sound. The other members each arrived from a different place.
Mariel had competed on The Voice Kids Philippines. Ayaka was a former child actress of Filipino and Japanese descent who had been living in Japan. Odri was a professional dancer who had choreographed some of her future groupmates’ music videos. Jean had been signed as a FlipMusic soloist before the group concept came together. The five moved in together and trained for two years. In August 2026, VVINK was named as a participant in Philippine Selection Night for Eurovision Song Contest Asia, with the entry “Round ‘n Round.”
In April 2026, BINI stepped onto the Mojave Stage at Coachella as the first all-Filipino act in the festival’s history. Their set ran about forty-five minutes, ten songs ending with a remixed “Pantropiko.” The clip Coachella posted to Instagram passed thirty million views within a week.
Senator Bam Aquino filed a Senate resolution recognizing the performance. Two and a half years after Angelika wrote the song in five days at a songwriting camp, the lyric she had built for someone else was closing a festival set in the California desert, sung back to the stage by a crowd that mostly didn’t speak Tagalog.
What’s a song that pulled you in before you understood a single word of it?
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