Peso Pluma may not be a new artist: his first studio album came out in 2020. However, he’s currently enjoying a flush of success that is the latest illustration of Latin music’s strength in the US – and the world.
Earlier this week, Spotify named the 23 year-old singer/songwriter and rapper as the latest musician to join its US Radar emerging artists program, noting that he has already broken the record for single-day Latin streams in the US on the platform: last month, with his ‘Ella Baila Sola’ track.
The track has been topping Spotify’s US and global Top 50 charts, helping Pluma build a monthly audience of 48.5 million listeners on the service.
Spotify set this against the wider context of a surge in listening to Mexican music (or ‘Música Mexicana’) that has seen Mexican artists account for five of the top 20 songs on Spotify’s Daily Top Songs Global chart earlier this week.
Streaming services love to claim artists as their own, but Pluma’s success is not just a Spotify thing.
In its latest ‘Music Charts and Trends Recap’ sent to journalists, YouTube noted that Pluma had 10 entries in its latest US Top Songs chart, and that he was its second most popular artist in the US with 49.6m weekly views.
In fact, his music has generated 1.11bn total YouTube plays in the last 28 days alone, and while Mexico is his top market (with 533m views) the US is second with 214m.
There’s a story of independent success here: Pluma’s initial releases were through label El Cartel de Los Ángeles, and more recently he has partnered with Prajin Records to launch his own imprint called Double P Records, signing a number of other artists.
There is already plenty of data showing the growth of Latin music in the US. Industry body the RIAA recently revealed that in 2022, Latin recorded music revenues there grew by 23.8% year-on-year to $1.09bn – nearly four times the growth rate of the overall market.
Peso Pluma is the latest beneficiary of this trend, as well as of the streaming services’ energetic work to promote Latin music to a wider audience.
Just yesterday, Spotify launched a ‘Find Your Flow’ mobile activation designed to “help listeners discover which Latin music styles best define them” and then point them to relevant playlists, for example.
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