Bad Bunny, ‘Despacito’ and the End of English as Pop’s Global Currency: Manuel Abud on Latin Music’s Transformation

For decades, the surest route to international success for a Latin artist was to record in English. At Taiwan’s 2026 Golden Melody Festival, Latin Recording Academy CEO Manuel Abud explained why that logic no longer holds.

Held ahead of Taiwan’s Golden Melody Awards, the annual Golden Melody Festival conference brings together music industry leaders from around the world to discuss global trends, innovation, and the future of music. Speaking to delegates in Taipei, Abud opened the conference, titled “The Rise of Latin Music: From Regional Niche to Global Force,” by pushing back against a common misconception: Latin music, he stressed, is not a single genre. Drawing a comparison with Asian music, he argued that both are umbrella terms encompassing a vast spectrum of cultures, traditions and sounds. Today, Latin music – performed primarily in Spanish and Portuguese – reaches nearly 900 million people worldwide and generates billions through streaming, making it one of the fastest-growing sectors of the global music industry.

“For decades, sounds and rhythms have been transcending borders,” Abud told Variety after the event. “The evolution of Latin music from a regional genre to a dominant force on the global charts has been driven by milestones in various eras, including geopolitical history, propelling its growth as well as distribution technology such as downloading and streaming. Social media has also played a central role in accelerating Latin music’s growth.”

Abud mapped Latin music’s evolution across three distinct stages. The first was built on timeless classics – Consuelo Velázquez’s “Bésame Mucho” (1940), Dámaso Pérez Prado’s “Mambo No. 5” (1949), Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz’s Brazilian bossa nova and jazz song “The Girl from Ipanema” (1964), and the Mexican folk song “La Bamba” – songs that traveled the world through countless covers and reinterpretations, familiarizing international audiences with Latin sounds decades before crossover success became a commercial strategy.

The second stage arrived with immigration waves that brought Latin music into the American mainstream. Gloria Estefan, Ricky Martin, and Shakira were the era’s standard-bearers – but crucially, their biggest international hits were performed in English. The industry’s logic at the time was simple: English was the price of admission to global success. Abud pointed to Ricky Martin’s performance of “The Cup of Life” at the 1999 Grammys as the first real breakthrough for Latin music in the United States.

The third and most consequential stage began with streaming and social media – and with a single song. Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” in 2017, performed entirely in Spanish and rooted in Puerto Rican musical identity, proved that authenticity, not linguistic compromise, could drive global success. It changed the rules of the game. Today, no artist better embodies that shift than Bad Bunny. From opening the 65th Grammy Awards in 2023 to winning Album of the Year in 2026 with a fully Spanish-language record and performing at the recent Super Bowl, his trajectory – celebrated by Abud as the clearest proof of Latin music’s transformation – was decades in the making, even if it appears sudden from the outside.

“Traditionally Latin music growth has been driven by the diaspora in markets like the U.S. with Puerto Ricans arriving in New York and Cubans to Miami. In recent times, streaming has opened growth in Europe,” he said. “At The Latin Recording Academy, we are pleased to see our creators at the top of global music charts; we feel this reflects the collaborative efforts over the last decades.”

Looking ahead, he believes collaboration will define the genre’s next phase. “Music is dynamic, and the landscape continues to change with the lines between genres becoming less defined as creators develop a fusion of sounds,” he said. “As such, the next chapter of Latin music’s international expansion will be marked by collaborations; we have seen that as a huge driver.”

Language, once seen as the greatest barrier to international reach, is no longer the obstacle it once was. What moves audiences now is honest storytelling, cross-cultural collaboration, and artistic authenticity.

“For decades, the global music industry operated under a simple assumption: if you wanted to reach the world, you had to do it in English. Latin music and K-pop have challenged that assumption,” he said.