Despite a much larger English-speaking market, Latin American artists are taking the world by storm faster than some of the world’s top superstars.

Some Latin American artists have seen a rise in popularity unlike anything ever seen since the beginning of the new century.

It’s challenging to measure all of the plays a song gets nowadays, given the many ways to listen: Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, SoundCloud, TikTok, the radio, etc. But the fact that LatAm artists on our chart have exploded faster — especially on YouTube — than some of the most famous English-speaking artists is remarkable.

Two factors make this more striking:

1. More than twice the people in the world can speak English vs. Spanish, meaning a much bigger market for English songs.
2. By 2020, 74% of Latin America had access to the Internet, while the English-speaking countries (+ Europe, which is very English-fluent) had 90%+ access.

Amazingly, as we showed last week, most of this new LatAm talent has been coming from the tiny island of Puerto Rico.
The epitome example is Bad Bunny, but other artists like J Balvin, Daddy Yankee, and Bizarrap have achieved a similar feat compared to some English-speaking superstars.

Bad Bunny created a YouTube account in 2014, and in half the time has reached views superior to Taylor Swift’s while approaching Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran’s. Those artists have been on YouTube since around 2006-2007.

If we look at Spotify’s current Top 50 Globally, most songs are still from English-speaking artists, obviously. However, we counted Spanish-speaking artists appearing in 14 of the 50 songs — 28% of the total. Latin music is undoubtedly having its biggest moment yet.