Although it has had a presence in the United States for decades, with stars like the late Selena Quintanilla who fused Tejano music with pop, disco and R&B, something extraordinary happened in the last year.
The simple She dances Alone by Eslabón Armado and Peso Pluma surpassed one billion views in Spotify in December 2023, becoming the first regional Mexican music hit among the top 10 positions on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, which includes music from all genres, reaching number 4.
Days later, Bad Bunny’s collaboration with Grupo Frontera A x100to It reached number 5.
According to Luminate’s year-end report for 2023, four of the six Latin artists who reached 1 billion streams streaming in the United States they were Mexican or of Mexican origin: Peso Pluma, Eslabón Armado, Junior H and Fuerza Regida. They were also among the 125 most listened to artists.
Overall, regional Mexican music grew 60% in the United States, representing 21.9 billion on-demand audio streams.
How it happened? The Associated Press reached out to musicians, producers and industry experts to get a sense of how regional Mexican music is evolving ahead of the 66th annual Grammy Awards on Feb. 4.
He burst in with force
Leila Cobo, Billboard’s director of Latin and Spanish content, told the AP that she believed Mexican music was always going to be very popular in the United States, given its large Mexican-American population. “But I never in a million years thought it was going to become so global,” she said.
For Cobo, one of the factors that contribute to the international reach of regional Mexican music is the streaming, that democratized listening habits and allowed listeners who might not otherwise encounter this music to fall in love with it.
On Spotify alone, Mexican music grew 400% worldwide in the last five years, according to Uriel Waizel, editorial leader at Spotify Mexico. And on YouTube, Peso Pluma surpassed Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny to become the most listened to artist of 2023 on the platform.
Besides of streaming, Cobo targets a large Mexican-American population in the United States interested in exploring the music of their ancestors, and a new generation of musicians who embrace regional music, but mix it with rap, reggaeton and electronic instrumentation, invigorating it in the process.
“It went from being a bit old-fashioned music,” says Cobo. “Now I see movement. And I think that’s exciting.”
Waizel says that while Mexican music is centuries old, “current Mexican music is breaking it because it’s the music that young people listen to.”
Spotify confirmed that last month, 56% of listeners of Latin American artists were under 30 years old. In Mexico, the figure increases to 60% of listeners.
“Before, parents taught regional music to their children, but now young people are the ones teaching parents music,” said DannyLux, 19 years old and a performer of sad sierreño, a new subgenre that emerged about five years ago. . “Regional music is reaching the heights of reggaeton, that was not seen before.”
A movement
According to Grammy and Latin Grammy award-winning Mexican producer Édgar Barrera, to understand regional Mexican music, listeners must first understand that it is a movement that finally has its: “time to shine globally,” he says, because the Mexican artists now span a variety of genres and sounds.
He mentioned Grupo Frontera’s cumbias and Peso Pluma’s corridos tumbados, both with very different lyrical approaches, but in those global charts: “doing those numbers that American (American) artists are doing.”
Artists like Grupo Frontera, Fuerza Regida and Junior H are selling out tickets in the same venues (forums)… that Drake goes to, he noted.
Barrera believes part of the cross-border appeal is that these regional Mexican genres rely on live instrumental performance: guitars, tubas, trombones, trumpets and more.
“They are real musicians, they are people making real music and it is not a computer where you are programming or grabbing something from a sound library,” he noted.
Regional is now international
Last summer, at the Premios Juventud ceremony in Puerto Rico, Mexican singer-songwriter Carín León wore a t-shirt with the English phrase (Expletive) el Regional, a reference to the phrase ‘regional Mexican music’, and then published a manifesto criticizing the ways in which different types of Mexican folk music have been restricted by the term.
“Labeling it as regional” is incorrect, he told the AP. “We are not more ‘regional’, we are more ‘international’.”
And it is not only Mexican artists who experiment with the genre. Colombian superstar Maluma released a northern pop song on his 2023 album Don Juancall according to whoa collaboration with León.
Maluma told the AP that he sensed years ago that corridos and banda music were going to enter the global music market. So, he called Barrera, the producer, in 2018 and said, “I need different instrumental pieces because I want to start writing Mexican songs, like regional music. He said, ‘Why? Let’s keep doing reggaeton,’ and I was like, ‘you will see!'”.
And then the Mexican sound was everywhere.
“I’m very glad it happened because we really needed it in the industry,” Maluma said. “That Mexican flavor, we were losing in the global vision of Latin music.”
It has not been easy
Not long ago, regional Mexican music was in a complicated situation. For some, it was subject to a kind of classism, vilified in the same way that reggaetón was before it was accepted around the world.
Now, a new generation is responsible for refreshing the way the world sees it, the same reason singer Pedro Tovar of Eslabón Armado hopes the genre will change from regional Mexican to just Mexican music.
“The roots are there, for a younger generation of listeners, and the genre is expanding more and more,” he says.
On the other hand, less than a decade ago, the category of best ranchera/mariachi music album did not compete at the 2016 Latin Grammys due to the lack of participants in a year that was also marked by the death of icon Juan Gabriel and the retirement of Vicente Fernández of the stages.
“We started sounding the alarm years in advance to say ‘this genre is going down,'” Gabriel Abaroa Jr., then president of the Latin Recording Academy, said in an interview with the AP that year.
Actress and singer Lucero, a veteran performer of regional Mexican music, also remembers those days.
“A few years ago the problem was that regional music was disappearing and it was increasingly difficult to sing ranchera songs,” he said. But now that she is having a revival, she is very excited even if the songs are a hybrid in the genre.
Pride for young people
While there is no shortage of musical genres to try, young Latin musicians continue to embrace and experiment with regional Mexican music. They see it as a source of pride, a connection and a celebration of their identity.
It’s something that 26-year-old Mexican-American artist Becky G accomplished with her latest album, corners, which she described as: “a love letter to my grandparents, to myself when I was younger and I hope to future generations.”
“Since I was a child I always talked with my grandparents about doing a project totally inspired by regional Mexican music,” she said.
And being part of a time when regional Mexican music is bigger than ever is something she describes as something that makes them feel very proud.
Featherweight, 24, agrees.
“It feels very good, hearing all these people from different countries listening and singing my songs, it’s just a dream,” he told AP at the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards.
“I am very grateful for the genre that I play. It is globalizing and breaking barriers. And I am grateful for all the people who are supporting Mexican music.”
Source: AP
