Songfacts®:

• In this song, T-Pain hits the club and puts the moves on a lady, offering to buy her a drink with the option to head back to his place after for some lovemaking.
  
  T-Pain had a Bebo site (one of many social media properties) at the time where he explained the meaning of the song: "Basically, these days lots of people begin their relationships in the clubs. Whole conversations begin with some guy buying a young lady a drink. I wanted to make a song for those folks."
• This was the first single from T-Pain's second album, Epiphany. His first album, released in 2005, make headlines for its use of Auto-Tune, which many thought would be a quickly passing fad. But by 2007, many rappers were experimenting with it, often with T-Pain's help, and it became the hot new sound. With the tracks on Epiphany, he doubled down on Auto-Tune and drew the winning card: "Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin')" went to #1 in America, as did the album.
• Yung Joc features on this track, dropping verses where he does some sweet-talking of his own in the club. T-Pain borrows a line from Joc's 2006 track "Patron" when he sings, "On that Patron you should get like me."
• The hook is a pastiche of hooks interpolated from other rap songs: Lil Scrappy's "Money in the Bank," Lil Jon's, "Snap Yo Fingers," Lil Boosie's "Zoom," 50 Cent's "Just a Lil Bit" and Unk's "Walk It Out."
• According to T-Pain, he was consciously trying to make a hit when he wrote this song - the first time he had done that. Looking for a relatable storyline, he thought about what people like: drinking, girls, and especially drinking with girls. "What do you say to a girl to get her a drink?" he said in USA Today. "I really went down the list. That was the first time I had ever done that. I didn't like doing that, because that's not really making music to me — that's making hit songs to get some money real quick."
  
  "It got to where I actually liked the song," he added. "Then it became my first #1."
• At the inaugural 2007 VH1 Soul Presents: Vibe Awards Special, this song was awarded the Song Of The Year title.
• With a chart run that includes 24, 14, 10, 7, 5, 4, 3, 1, 2, 4, 3, 3, 4, 5, 5, 5, 6, 9, 8, 11, 12, 15 and 19, "Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin')" spent time in each of the top 12 positions on the Hot 100. This broke the record of "Truly Madly Deeply" by Savage Garden that previously had been the only single in the history of the Hot 100 to spend time in each of the top 10 positions on the chart during its run.
• More ringtones were purchased in 2007 of this tune in America than any other song, a massive 2,308,769 being sold.
• T-Pain was born in Tallahassee, Florida with the name of Faheem Rasheed Najm. His stage name is short for "Tallahassee Pain" and is meant to reflect the difficult times he had living there.
• T-Pain reworked this song as "Buy U a Frosty" for a 2023 Wendy's ad campaign.