About

Shittyflute refers to the practice of intentionally covering songs on the flute terribly for humorous effect in videos. The form has mostly been popularized by the YouTube account Shittyflute.

Origin

On November 27th, 2009, YouTuber Matt Mulholland uploaded a cover of the song "My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion played on a recorder (shown below).

Spread

On January 9th, 2013, the 20th Century Flute YouTube channel uploaded a recording of the 20th Century Fox theme played with a recorder (shown below).

On January 24th, 2015, the Shittyflute YouTube channel uploaded a cover of Iggy Azalea's Fancy, and gained over 26,000 views (shown below).

In the coming years, Shittyflute would go on to upload over a hundred more videos and amass over 220,000 subscribers.^[1] Some of his most popular covers include Take On Me, which gained over 2.6 million views (shown below, left) and Britney Spears' "Toxic", which gained 1.6 million views (shown below, right).

Shittyflute began to draw media coverage in late 2016. On October 26th, the channel was covered by Buzzfeed.^[2] Electronic Beats^[3] and The Fader^[4] have also covered the channel. On July 2nd, 2015, a subreddit was created for users to upload their own shitty flute covers by xbsd,^[5] though it only has 1,100 subscribers.

Various Examples

Similar Covers

Other popular videos in which a person poorly plays a popular song had appeared on YouTube. Most notably, P.Lo uploaded "Jurassic Park Theme Song (Melodica Cover)" on January 30th, 2012, and has since gained over 13 million views (shown below).

Search Interest

External References