Spotify puts its focus on Puerto Rico

For the past five years, the exponential growth of the streaming music content platform Spotify has gone hand in hand with the worldwide rise in popularity of the urban genre, particularly the reggaeton. That is why it should come as no surprise to anyone that Puerto Rico, as the cradle of the genre, has become one of the priorities for the company born in Sweden in 2006, according to two of its executives.

“Puerto Rico is very important to us. We recently launched some local ‘playlists’ like Breaking: Puerto Ricocomposed of fashionable songs, Made in Puerto Ricowith Puerto Rican artists, and Puerto Rican saucewith island salsa themes, as the first step towards opening a little more space and talking a little more about Puerto Rico and what is happening, something that we hope to continue evolving and creating more spaces to give a little ‘highlight’ to Puerto Rico”, explained Maykol Sánchez, manager of the area of ​​Relations with Artists and Record Labels for the Latin market of the United States and Latin America of Spotify. “I think it’s super important and that’s why we’re here. We want the island to feel it, that Puerto Rico matters to us and that we are here to help them continue promoting talent.”

Spotify executives are on the island to take part in several talks that are held within the framework of Your Music Urban Conferencewhich take place on June 21 and 22, as a prelude to the Your Urban Music Awardswhich will take place on Thursday, June 23, at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico. Today Tuesday, participated in the talk: “Streaming versus radio: how does your music sound?” and tomorrow they will be at the Spotify Masterclass “Spotify For Artists”where they will explain everything about the platform, as well as show all the tools available to artists and producers.

unstoppable development

In recent years, Spotify has become the main music streaming platform, ahead of Apple Music, Amazon Music Unlimited y YouTube Music, among many others. Currently, the platform is available in 183 countries around the world, either through a free service with ads or as a subscription. This has allowed the public, regardless of the country in which they reside, to listen to artists from other markets that were previously impossible to do so.

“Partly, The growth that the platform has had has been a great driver of the explosion of Latin music through the urban, due to the reach that an artist has through the platform, which allows audiences to be much more diverse and much more bigger”, detailed Sanchez. “There are reggaeton artists who have huge audiences in Europe on Spotify. To this we must add that the audience that reggaeton has in the United States continues to grow every year and that today the most listened to artist in the last two years in a row, is the Puerto Rican Bad Bunny”.

For Antonio Vázquez, president of Editorial for the Latin market in the United States of Spotify, the “streaming” platform has broken down barriers and has made it possible to truly discover the musical taste of people all over the world.

“Streaming was the format that really reflected global trends. For the first time, the numbers for music consumption in Latin America, in Spain, in Italy and in Latinos in the United States, among others, reflected the consumption that had always existed for Latin music. What happens is that before, when the radio was more local, you didn’t see consumer data in the demand for Latin music like now, even though it existed,” said Vázquez, who works in Spotify’s Miami regional office.

Part of Spotify’s strength is that they have created working groups in different markets, in order to strengthen their proposal with music from emerging local artists and the most recognized, something they would like to do in Puerto Rico in the future, since they still do not have representation. local. “We have a very local mentality in the sense that we want to act locally, but have a global impact. So for all the countries we have local teams that try to push the local culture of the countries. We are seeing it now in Chile with reggaeton, as well as in Spain where there are very strong artists who are exporting their music more than ever before,” added Vázquez. “For this reason, we want and hope that this is the beginning of a much greater visibility of Spotify in Puerto Rico and that we are much more here. Spotify is listened to a lot here and, at the end of the day, Puerto Rico is a house of talent, it is an incubator of talent and we believe that we must continue to enlarge that space and help it to continue exporting many more artists.”.

Spotify’s impact on the music industry is so great that, according to executives, To date, 60,000 songs a day enter the platform globally. Of those, between 5,000 to 10,000 a week are new Latin songs. “In the past few years, we have seen great growth in everything Latin and we have seen much more talent developing everywhere, which has led our teams to grow internally at Spotify to ensure that we can give you the best service and be the best partner for all artists, record companies and distributors”, mentioned Sánchez.

reggaeton growth

Latin music has had incredible growth on the Spotify platform, something that is due in large part to reggaeton and the rhythms within the urban genre, which has recently had such a boom. “Today you really can’t talk about growth and the Latin boom without talking about reggaeton. Reggaeton and urban music have really been the rocket that has launched Latin music to the moon, at least in the last five or six years”Vasquez added. “A lot of people highlight the moment when ‘Despacito’ exploded Luis Fonsi y Daddy Yankee, but really from a couple of years ago there was already a very strong trend of the urban genre. So yes, Reggaeton is really the weapon that has taken Latin music to where it is today.”

Similarly, in Sánchez’s opinion, urban music has been a key piece for people in other foreign countries to become interested in Latin culture. “We have reached a level where urban music has made the rest of the cultures and the Anglo world want to be part of the Latin world. And all that happens through urban music and reggaeton”Sanchez mentioned. “It’s been an incredible explosion over the last couple of years, which still has huge room for growth.”

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