How Bad Bunny leapt to the top of the global music charts

MOST MUSICIANS, when they decide to do a concert residency, head to Las Vegas. In recent years megastars including Adele, Celine Dion and U2 have made tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars playing to crowds in Sin City. But not Bad Bunny. On July 11th the Puerto Rican rapper and singer will begin a run of 30 concerts in San Juan, the capital, before setting off on a world tour. It is symbolic of how the musician has become a global hitmaker while keeping one foot on the island. “He is Puerto Rican and he wants you to know it,” says Kacho López Mari, a film-maker who has worked with the musician.

It took Bad Bunny (whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) less than a decade to hop to the top of pop music. In 2013 he began uploading his songs to SoundCloud, a streaming site. Three years later he was signed by a record label. And two years after that he collaborated with Cardi B, an American rapper, and J Balvin, a Colombian singer, on a track called “I Like It”, which topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart in America.

MOST MUSICIANS, when they decide to do a concert residency, head to Las Vegas. In recent years megastars including Adele, Celine Dion and U2 have made tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars playing to crowds in Sin City. But not Bad Bunny. On July 11th the Puerto Rican rapper and singer will begin a run of 30 concerts in San Juan, the capital, before setting off on a world tour. It is symbolic of how the musician has become a global hitmaker while keeping one foot on the island. “He is Puerto Rican and he wants you to know it,” says Kacho López Mari, a film-maker who has worked with the musician.

It took Bad Bunny (whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) less than a decade to hop to the top of pop music. In 2013 he began uploading his songs to SoundCloud, a streaming site. Three years later he was signed by a record label. And two years after that he collaborated with Cardi B, an American rapper, and J Balvin, a Colombian singer, on a track called “I Like It”, which topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart in America.

Since then Bad Bunny’s fans have multiplied like, well, rabbits. In 2018 his songs were streamed 2.5bn times according to Luminate, an analytics firm; by 2024 that figure had jumped to 11.5bn. Between 2020 and 2022 Bad Bunny was the most-played artist on Spotify, making him the first musician to claim the top spot for three consecutive years.

Bad Bunny’s record-breaking is all the more notable because he raps and sings almost exclusively in his mother tongue. In the early 2000s the biggest rappers in the world were all American; Latin artists, such as Enrique Iglesias, had to perform in English if they wanted to reach a global audience. No longer.

In 2022 Bad Bunny’s album “Un Verano Sin Ti” (“A Summer Without You”) was the first Spanish-language record to be nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys. His forthcoming tour sold 2.6m tickets in a week. The majority of the concerts will take place in Hispanophone countries, including Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Spain. But Bad Bunny will also perform in places with very few Spanish speakers, such as Japan and Poland.

Three factors explain his success. The first is the music itself. Bad Bunny puts a Latin twist on popular genres such as trap (a style of hip-hop) and house (a type of electronic music) by incorporating local sounds such as reggaeton, plena and salsa. Plena, an Afro-Puerto Rican mode, is highly rhythmic, involving syncopated beats on instruments such as panderos (hand drums) and maracas. When combined with Bad Bunny’s swagger, this makes for tracks both danceable and distinctive.

Bad Bunny borrows freely and often, never hewing to one influence for long. This keeps his work exciting. “We never know what we’re going to get,” says Vanessa Díaz of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, who teaches a course on Bad Bunny and is the co-author of a forthcoming book on the musician. “He doesn’t follow trends. He sets them.”

The second factor is his lyrics. Some of Bad Bunny’s fans will not understand what he is saying, but those who do often appreciate his political sensibilities. In 2019 Bad Bunny collaborated on a track, “Afilando Los Cuchillos” (“Sharpening the Knives”), which criticised Puerto Rico’s governor at the time and the “manipulation, corruption, conspiracies” of the island’s politics. The title of “El Apagón” (“The Blackout”), a hit in 2022, refers to the regular power failures that plunge the island into darkness. In a documentary film tacked on to the music video, locals complain about gentrification and being forced out of their homes by luxury property developers. “Esta es mi playa / Este es mi sol / Esta es mi tierra,” the song asserts: “This is my beach / This is my sun / This is my land.”

He encourages listeners to feel pride in where they are from. Ms Díaz says Bad Bunny has made speaking Spanish cool at a time when it is often denigrated in America. He sees his Puerto Rican upbringing as something to honour, not ignore. “All of PR is my crew,” he raps on “ACHO PR”. Fancy festivals in California are all well and good, but he prefers “singing for free in Loíza than at Coachella”.

The third reason for Bad Bunny’s breakout is timing. Demand for Spanish-language culture has soared. In the first half of 2024 viewers spent almost 7bn hours watching shows in Spanish on Netflix, according to Omdia, a research firm. Bad Bunny has ridden that wave and helped it surge. Anamaria Sayre, a co-host of Alt.Latino, a music show on National Public Radio, says that when she was growing up in America, “You didn’t hear Spanish music in white spaces...now it is everywhere.”

Bad Bunny is certainly doing his best to make sure that it is: he will be stopping in 18 countries across four continents on his tour. “We will look back on this as a turning-point,” says Ms Díaz. “Bad Bunny didn’t just succeed in Spanish—he changed what global success could look and sound like.” Yet even when he is “travelling the whole world”, Bad Bunny says on “ACHO PR”, he is still the young man “who sat in La Perla with my grandma”. 

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