For the third year in a row, Bad Bunny was the most streamed global artist on Spotify. Amassing over 18.5 billion streams in 2022, it more than doubled the amount it racked up last year. His latest album, “Un Verano Sin Ti” was also the most streamed album in the world, and two of his songs ranked in the top five most streamed tracks. These accomplishments conclude a year full of accolades, successes and world tours.
In early November, Bad Bunny was named Artist of the Year by Apple Music. His last four months have been spent jumping from sold-out stadiums to sold-out stadiums around the world. In recent years, his music has reverberated everywhere, from college bars in the Midwest to the Super Bowl halftime show. Bad Bunny got his first acting role on “Bullet Train” and even had a float in Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade.
In short: Bad Bunny is everywhere — and the world is obsessed.
But how the 28-year-old went from being a supermarket bagger in his native Puerto Rico to a global phenomenon and one of Latin music’s most recognized voices in the space of six years isn’t just a another example of an artist’s meteoric rise to fame, said Larry Miller, professor of music business at New York University’s Steinhardt School — it underscores the changing landscape of the music industry, as well that Bad Bunny’s flair for performance and an unparalleled ability to “capture a zeitgeist moment,” he said.
“If only we could bottle this thing that Bad Bunny has and duplicate it,” Miller told The Washington Post. “That would be the recipe for success for any artist.”
This thing is hard to put into words, Miller said. “That’s what makes him such a captivating artist. It’s the song. This is his performance. This is the construction of the song. It’s his partnership with producers and his collaborations with different artists. It is its power, its energy and its charm. That’s all.
Like some members of more recent generations of musicians, Bad Bunny started releasing music on SoundCloud. In 2016, her single “Diles” caught the attention of a producer and led to a record deal. With a slew of singles under his belt, Bad Bunny’s fame began to grow among Spanish speakers, across Latin America, and eventually around the world.
In 2018, Bad Bunny landed his first No. 1 hit, “I Like It,” which featured Cardi B. That year, he released his debut studio album, “X 100Pre” — which reached No. #1 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums Chart. His latest compilation, “Un Verano Sin Ti”, made history as the first entirely Spanish-language album to earn a Grammy nomination of the year. The week after its release in May, Latin music temporarily became the fourth most popular genre in the United States, surpassing country for the first time, according to a mid-year 2022 report from Luminate, a music data provider. entertainment.
That success and global reach, Miller said, has been exacerbated by the rise of streaming — which not only “generates nearly 85% of recorded music industry revenue,” but has also helped Latin music become most popular in the world. According to Luminate’s report, Latin music streaming has increased by 33% this year.
“While Latin music has always been around, it never had the traction it has now. It has to do with changing demographics in the United States and other major markets around the world,” said Miller: “But Spotify and the other big digital music services have driven an acceptance, even among non-Spanish speakers, of music that’s not in their native language but is absolutely contagious.”
On Wednesday, Robert Wong’s Spotify Wrapped was proof of that. According to his gameplay, the 23-year-old from New York spent 8,087 minutes playing Bad Bunny, which is the equivalent of nearly 135 hours, or more than five full days. Three of Wong’s most streamed songs were also by Bad Bunny.
“I’m probably the number one Bad Bunny listener who’s Asian American in the world,” he said.
Wong wears it as a badge of honor or a representation of his “several years’ journey” of discovering Latin music. It all started when he heard Daddy Yankee’s song “Limbo” in 2012 during a trip to the Dominican Republic as a teenager. Then, in college, he heard a Bad Bunny song playing at a bar he and his friends frequented in Indiana. But Wong’s life-changing moment was when Bad Bunny released their debut album. “That’s when I became a complete fan,” he said.
“Coming from someone who doesn’t understand all the lyrics, his vibe and the way he produces his music is really catchy,” Wong said. “Also, listening to Bad Bunny helps me learn more about Spanish and how sentences are structured in the language. That’s a really good thing.
Although he is already in Bad Bunny’s top 0.5% listener, Wong said his goal for 2023 is to be in the artist’s top 0.0001% listener.
His action plan: “Listen to it on repeat until I’m number one.
