La Revolución Continues: Latin Artists Lead Mid-Year Chart

The wildfire growth of Latin music and the markets where the genres come from is remarkable if difficult to fathom. Even a veteran promoter like Phil Rodriguez, CEO of Move Concerts, cannot quite wrap his head around it.

“I mean, the Latin market’s insane,” Rodriguez, who has been in the business for more than four decades, told Pollstar last year.
“It’s just unstoppable. That’s just a reality that’s here. … I mean, you hear of some of the grosses Bad Bunny has in arenas — it’s stadium grosses in arenas. It’s mind-boggling.”

One look at the ticket sales and grosses of Latin artists and you’d be hard-pressed to disagree with Rodriguez. Of the 13 Latin artists on Pollstar’s 2024 Mid-Year Top 100 Worldwide Tours, three cracked the top five with grosses surpassing $100 million.

Bad Bunny’s massively successful “Most Wanted Tour” finished No. 2 with a whopping $174.57 million across 40 shows (just a hair behind Madonna’s top-grossing “Celebration Tour,” which came in at $178.8 million with 15 more shows). Veteran Latin crooner Luis Miguel, who hit the road last August for the first time since 2019, was just behind the Puerto Rican rapper with a haul of $169.45 million, and Karol G’s “Mañana Será Bonito” stadium tour garnered $111.29 million, placing her fifth on the list.

The number of Latin tours on this year’s Top 100 list is a slight drop from the 15 that placed on the 2023 Mid-Year chart, but the artists ranked this year have significantly outgrossed and sold more tickets. The 13 Latin tours on 2024’s list — which includes RBD, Laura Pausini, Don Omar, Aventura and the “Trilogy Tour” with Enrique Iglesias, Pitbull and Ricky Martin — grossed a combined $676.7 million, a 114% increase compared to last year’s 15 Latin tours on the 2023 Mid-Year chart which combined for a $315.3 million gross.

Ticket sales from this year’s ranked Latin artists also spiked with 5,046,431 tickets sold, which is a 52% increase from last year’s group, which sold 3,321,095.

It’s a limited sample size of the industry at large, but the figures show the power and influence of the top Latin artists and consumers, something agents and promoters have known for quite some time.

“This business has been around a long time. It’s just that in the last few years, corporate America has caught up,” WME agent Richard Lom told Pollstar. “There are promoters and families that have been serving Hispanic communities for a long time. You can talk about Henry Cárdenas, the Megret family from Texas, the Zamoras, the Frias family, the Valdivia family, who well before Live Nation and AEG and corporate America were serving the Hispanic community. Thankfully, it just keeps growing and getting stronger and stronger every year.”

One artist who catapulted Latin music, particularly reggaeton, to new heights was Bad Bunny. The megastar wrapped his arena tour in the U.S. in May and may have taken the No. 1 spot had some of his final concerts, including three June shows at Coliseo de Puerto Rico in San Juan, not missed Pollstar’s midyear window (which closed May 15, 2024). While it was a surprise for him not to hit stadiums as he did in 2022, a move that then made him the highest-grossing artist in a calendar year with $435 million (a record that Taylor Swift has since broken), Bad Bunny’s decision to perform at arenas turned out to be the right play, allowing him to reconnect with fans on a more intimate level and reintroduce himself as the trap artist fans grew to love.

“He is just so genuine and authentic and wears his heart on his sleeve and puts the music out that he connects with and represents Puerto Rico and his roots in such a way that it’s really hard to not feel it,” Jbeau Lewis, United Talent Agency agent and partner, said about his client in 2022. “It transcends all borders and languages and any sort of label you could put on it, it just feels good.”

Lewis’ other client, Karol G, made the jump to stadiums last year and saw massive success wherever she went. The Colombian singer’s feats across the world is an indication of the fact that Latin music has outgrown its borders and appeals to crowds all over the world, and that “the landscape has shifted,” says Hans Schafer, Live Nation’s senior vice president of global touring who works on Latin tours.

“There’s obviously been huge waves of immigration from different countries,” Schafer recently told Pollstar. “You’re seeing [Latin] culture infuse itself in the cities at all different levels, and all those things are that canary we’re following and looking for that opportunity where we can try some things out. The other piece that is incredibly exciting is the new markets. The reach we’re seeing with these artists, we’ve not yet seen how far they can go down.”

Then there’s an artist like Luis Miguel, 54, who is selling out arenas and stadiums across the Americas and flexing the multigeneration- al muscle Latin music possesses. The Puerto Rican-born Mexican singer has been crooning audiences for four decades and his latest tour is already the greatest run of his storied career.

“Why is this happening? Because he’s an idol. People love him,” said Henry Cárdenas, CEO and founder of Cárdenas Marketing Network, which is promoting Miguel’s tour. “The other thing is that he doesn’t go out every year, and people were hungry to see him.”

With a diverse group of artists on the road like influential rockers Caifanes and Café Tacvba, pop queen Gloria Trevi, Brazilian star Anitta, urbano singer Feid, and many more like Carin León and Shakira embarking on tours later this year, Latin music is in a very healthy state and a driving force in entertainment. Its continued success proves that while the popularity of genres within the Latin umbrella is cyclical, the music has found its grip on the industry and isn’t struggling to stay in the limelight as it did in the past.

“I don’t see it as a wave or trend. I think it’s here to stay,” said singer Luis Fonsi, whose 2017 song “Despacito” was a global sensation. “I love how it is evolving. We all know that music is cyclical, and I’m sure three

or four years from now it might be a little different, but I think the important thing and common denominator is that Latin music and culture are being embraced by people who normally, 10 to 15 years ago, probably wouldn’t leave on a [Spanish-language] song on the radio for more than 10 seconds in ar- eas like middle America. Now, it’s more Top 40, more mainstream.”