The Global Rise of Regional Mexican Music: Insights from the Mexico Music Report

According to data from Mexico Music Report, recently published by the Mexico Music Initiative, there are 36 million Mexicans living in the United States, including immigrants and Americans who identify as Mexican. This data is revealing to understand current music consumption trends, since in recent years the rise of regional Mexican music in the US market has been largely due to the support of the population of Mexican origin in that country.

As the report mentions, there are a number of factors that have helped this genre today enjoy never-before-seen exposure not only in the US, but also worldwide. From Mexican cultural diversity, the arrival of digital streaming, and even its geographical position, since it is this proximity to the most important economy in the world that has allowed a unique synergy between the Mexican music industry and the Anglo-Saxon territory.

Consequently, the growth of the Mexican regional has been a clear commitment to content for streaming platforms and social networks. “Music made in Mexico, particularly the regional Mexican (RGMX), has been a spearhead that has made its way to other latitudes, since this genre is the local musical style that attracts the most new listeners, above others such as reggaeton, pop or hip hop”he claimed Uriel Waizel, editor-in-chief of Spotify México, for the Música México Report.

It is on this platform that the Mexican regional obtained more than 39 billion reproductions in the world, only in 2021, that is, it had an increase of 39% in listeners in Mexico and 31% in the United States, without forgetting Guatemala, Chile and Colombia like the three countries that follow it in popularity. By August 2022, Spotify was already reporting that global listening to Mexican music had grown 56% annually.

The globalization of Mexican music is such that currently more than half of the listeners who discover a national artist through SpotifyThey do it out of the country. In the regional Mexican spectrum, the report also points out that its success in other latitudes is due, on the one hand, to the new crop of artists who managed to captivate the ears of Generation Z, young people between the ages of 18 and 24 who they represent 40% of listeners for this type of music. And on the other, the fact that new sounds have been incorporated into the subgenres and traditional styles of the Mexican regional, thus achieving great acceptance by the new wave of listeners on digital platforms.

The corrido is precisely the subgenre that has gained the most popularity lately and today accounts for more than half of the streams within the Mexican regional. The report highlights that it has stood out in such a way that in the last five years it increased by 91% worldwide to reach 24 billion streams on Spotify during 2021. It is followed by subgenres such as sierreño and norteño that last year past grew by 71 and 50%, respectively.

In that same year, in YouTube Things were not very different for Mexican music, since its presence in the most viewed video tops in Mexico and beyond its borders led artists like Christian Nodal, Carin León, Caliber 50 And till Vicente Fernandez coexist on those charts with international artists from other genres.

But the growing trend of consumption of the Mexican regional is also reflected in other areas of music such as recording studios and festivals. Until a few years ago, it was almost unthinkable that the genre would dare to coexist with someone else that was not properly Mexican, but the corridos tumados and the successful collaborations like Christian Nodal with Gera MX or MS band with Snoop Dogg, have shown that the formula works and is attractive. According to data from Spotify Collaborations between Mexican and international artists in the last two years reached 31,000 songs, which offers opportunities to discover new fans around the world.

The ground that the Mexican regional has gained in the most important stages of the world seems to have no going back, festivals like Lives Latin y Coachella have had consolidated and rising artists of the genre such as Tigres del Norte, Grupo Firme and Natanael Cano in their lineups; even the Made in Americafestival created in 2012 by Jay-Zwhich last year included rigid force as the first act of its kind in its history.

The regional exhibition has not gone unnoticed in Chartmetricbecause in 2021 he also published an article about the promotion of the genre and its main exponents in front of world-class artists within pop, reggaeton and hiphop.

Having these data is of the utmost importance for a genre that has historically been considered purely local and under stereotypes that limited its potential to connect with new audiences, but its recent renaissance and internationalization is even more crucial to consolidate itself as a sustained success in the wide music market.