6 of LatAm's Top 10 Artists on Spotify are from Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico, with 3.3M people or 0.4% of LatAm's population, is the birthplace of 6 of the region's top 10 most streamed artists on Spotify. There is no way such a stat is a product of chance. There must be an incredible force behind the success of so many artists from a tiny island roughly the size of Connecticut, the US's 3rd smallest state.

For over a hundred years, the island has been the motherland of original music genres like Bomba by enslaved Africans, Plena by Jíbaros (native farmers), Danza (adapted from Europe's contradanza), and more recently, reggaeton and Latin trap.

The US territory, the only one that maintains Spanish as the official language, has one of the world's highest concentrations of music stars per capita (perhaps the highest).

When looking at Spotify streams, singers like Ricky Martin or Chayanne are at a disadvantage because they became big well before Spotify existed, so they do not appear on our chart. However, the last 20 or so years have brought about a new era of rappers like Residente and reggaeton superstars, best exemplified by Bad Bunny, currently the most streamed artist on the planet for three years in a row.

Bad Bunny was inspired by “the King of reggaeton,” Daddy Yankee, who is 4th on the list despite also having somewhat of a disadvantage, given his iconic song, Gasolina, came out in 2004, when your writer still burned custom CDs and used a Walkman. Gasolina was listed as #50 by Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and there's absolutely no way you haven’t heard it before.

Colombian J Balvin is number two on the list and has more streams than Dua Lipa and Taylor Swift. Behind every great artist, there's a great producer. In J Balvin's case, that person is “Sky Rompiendo,” who is responsible for some of J Balvin's greatest hits and collaborations like Safari with Pharell Williams. Sky has also produced songs for Ozuna and Maluma, also top 10 artists, and many other Latin stars.

So, undoubtedly, Puerto Rico and Colombia LatAm's music capitals. The big inexplicable question is: why are there 0 artists from Brazil and Mexico in Latin America's top 10?