Discoteca global: why 2017 was the year Latin pop broke through

As well as being insanely infectious, tracks such as Luis Fonsi’s Despacito and J Balvin’s Mi Gente have scored billions of streams thanks to an increasingly cross-cultural pop market

On 31 December 2016, a curious thing happened on YouTube. The platform’s most-watched music video on New Year’s Eve wasn’t a hoary old seasonal favourite, a longstanding party anthem or one of the year’s biggest hits. It was Chantaje, a Spanish-language reggaeton-influenced track by Shakira, featuring a guest appearance from her fellow Colombian singer-songwriter Maluma. Chantaje is a great song – tense, infectious, and with an accompanying video that is diverting, featuring as it does Shakira walking a small pig on a leash and twerking in front of the urinals in a gents’ lavatory. But still: more popular as 2016 drew to an end than any of the year’s inescapable hit singles? Bigger than Drake’s One Dance or Sia’s Cheap Thrills or Justin Bieber’s Sorry? Apparently so: 15.3 million people watched it in just 24 hours.

As it turned out, Chantaje’s popularity wasn’t an aberration so much as a hint of things to come. Latin pop has been one of 2017’s biggest success stories. By common consent, Despacito by Puerto Rico’s Luis Fonsi, featuring Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber, was the song of the summer: 16 weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, making it the joint longest-running No 1 in US history; a chart-topper everywhere from the Philippines to the Czech Republic; both the second and third most-streamed song of the year on Spotify (the remix featuring Bieber just pipping the original version); the first YouTube video in history to reach 4bn views. It was followed by Cuban-American singer Camila Cabello’s transatlantic No 1 Havana; Mi Gente, a single by Columbian reggaeton star J Balvin and French singer and producer Willy William remixed to include a guest appearance by Beyoncé; and Reggaeton Lento, which began life as a single by CNCO – a boyband put together on Simon Cowell’s Latin American version of The X Factor, La Banda – before another Cowell-boosted pop band, Little Mix, were brought on board.

Continue reading...

from Music | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2BJTGFg