Big breakthrough for Bad Bunny in Brazil

SAO PAULO (AP):

While Bad Bunny has dominated global charts, the superstar has not had quite the same success in Brazil, a country notoriously hard for foreign stars to win over due to a devotion to national artistes. But a shift that began with his Grammy-winning album Debí Tirar Más Fotos may accelerate further after his first-ever gigs in Brazil on Friday and Saturday in Sao Paulo.

Bad Bunny is at the peak of his career, following the phenomenal hype around his performance at the Super Bowl halftime show.

“It’s the best time to try and unlock a country like Brazil, at a time when he’s managed to dominate practically the entire world,” said Felipe Maia, an ethnomusicologist who is pursuing a doctoral degree on popular music and digital technologies at Paris Nanterre University.

For years, the Puerto Rican artiste, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, has been one of the most-streamed artistes on the planet. But neither the singer, nor his album, nor his songs were among the most-played last year in Brazil, according to Spotify. The most-streamed artistes in the country in 2025 were all Brazilian.

In the land of samba, funk, bossa nova, choro, sertanejo, forro and pagode, among other Brazilian music genres, 75 per cent of streaming consumption in Brazil focuses on national artistes, according to the 2025 midyear music report of Luminate. Brazil is the country that most listens to its own music, it said.

Still, the fever around Bad Bunny has made headway in Brazil. Only one performance was initially scheduled at the Allianz Parque arena, but it sold out so quickly the artiste added an extra date, which also sold out. By mid-afternoon on Friday, long queues had formed. Brazilian fans mixed with people from El Salvador, Colombia and Venezuela. Many came wearing straw hats – used by Bad Bunny and traditionally worn by jíbaros, rural Puerto Rican farmers.

Tickets on Ticketmaster ranged from $50 to $210, but resellers on Friday were selling tickets for that same night for more than $830 – more than 2.5 times the minimum monthly wage in Brazil.

Flávia Durante, a Sao Paulo -based DJ who specialises in Latin American music, said that some Brazilians have a tendency to see Spanish-language music as corny due to the association with Mexican telenovelas, but that Bad Bunny pierced a bubble with his latest album.

“Nowadays everyone knows all the songs, they sing along and really get into it,” Durante said.

Since the half-time Super Bowl show, Bad Bunny’s average streams grew by 426 per cent on Spotify in Brazil in the following week. Many songs experienced massive streaming surges, with Yo Perreo Sola leading the growth with a 2,536 per cent increase.

During Brazil’s Carnival celebrations, Bad Bunny themed costumes were a fixture in Rio’s raucous, dazzling street parties. Nicole Froio, a Colombian Brazilian writer specialising in Latin American cultural issues, went kitted out in a straw hat and plastic, tropical plants that echo the background of his latest album. For a long time, Froio was the sole person among her Brazilian friendship group who liked Bad Bunny. She believes that Brazilians in general have trouble identifying themselves as Latino.

Brazil, like other countries in the Americas, was listed by Bad Bunny in the Super Bowl halftime show, when he reminded the world that while “America” is used as a synonym for the U.S. in the U.S., it is the name used across two continents.