There are those who believe that the fact that Bad Bunny has once again become the most listened to artist in the world is a musical anecdote. Or a symptom of the taste of new generations. Or an algorithmic anomaly. It is in fact an economic signal at all … It is one rule that should be interpreted with the same seriousness as one would analyze the Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) or income data in Silicon Valley. The 21st century economy is no longer explained by central banks: it is explained by Spotify.
Because Bad Bunny’s success is not an isolated phenomenon, but rather a vivid demonstration of how the attention economy works, that new world order where the scarce resources are not dollars or barrels of oil, but the minutes each person devotes to a song, video, or social network. And in that market—rougher than any oligopoly—Puerto Rico achieved what European regulators had been trying for years without success: dominance in an ecosystem dominated by North American giants, arcane algorithms and massive language biases in favor of English.
Bad Bunny’s dominance reveals two profound economic trends. The first is that platforms have broken the geography of consumption. Spanish, which for decades was considered a specialized language of the global cultural industries, today enters without permission at the front line of the income distribution. More than just a Latin victory, it serves as a reminder: when the market ceases to be mediated by powerful representative brokers, real demand emerges without complications.
The second trend is more interesting. Massive success no longer depends on mediocrity, but on the ability to occupy the digital conversation. In an environment where gratification is instant and supplies are unlimited, Those who can generate a continuous, almost artificial story about themselves are the ones who win. And then there’s Bad Bunny, who has become less of an artist and more of a relevant production machine. An economic agent who understands that in the age of attention, the important thing is not to look good, but to constantly look good.
There is a third, more uncomfortable element: the disintermediation of cultural authority has political consequences. If a Latino artist can rearrange global preferences without passing through Los Angeles, so can any political, media, or economic actor. Control of the agenda – that ancient obsession of governments and the media – is no longer played out in press conferences, but in the algorithms that decide what is heard, seen and forgotten. And those algorithms live in another country.
Bad Bunny’s annual coronation says nothing about the future of music, but it says a lot about the future of economics. In a world where attention is the new currency, the winners will be those who learn how to capture and maintain a worldview. The rest will continue singing in the shower. jmuller@abc.es