Horizontal bar chart comparing the highest grossing world tours in the first half of 2022, showing Bad Bunny's tour as the highest grossing | Sources: Pollstar 2022 Mid-Year Report, Latinometrics
Bad Bunny's Tour is the Highest Grossing of 2022

Bad Bunny used to bag groceries to pay for school. Today, he’s the world’s most profitable touring artist.

Benito Martinez was born to a lower-middle-class family in Puerto Rico. Son to a truck driver and a teacher, he was interested in music from a very young age. Growing up, Puerto Rican Reggaeton began to hit the mainstream, and Benito loved it. He went from singing in his local church’s choir to quitting at age 13 to write his own songs using the low-cost recording software Fruity Loops. Benito would then try his mixtapes with friends at school. He also had a peculiar fashion sense, sometimes wearing his mom’s clothes to create unique and colorful outfits.

A few years later, Benito worked bagging groceries to afford his way through college at the University of Puerto Rico. In his spare time, he continued to record music and upload it to SoundCloud as Bad Bunny, with no particular goal other than enjoying the creative process and getting better. One day, he returned home from work and saw that one of his singles, which he wrote and recorded entirely on his own, went viral around the island and ended up getting 1M+ listens in one week. Shortly after, in 2016, the local label Hear This Music signed the young artist. Bad Bunny then catapulted into fame with professional YouTube video productions alongside top Latin artists.

Bad Bunny recalls a concert in Rome in his early days when he realized that people who didn’t speak Spanish were into his music. Indeed, his albums are now global sensations, breaking so many records that he may be on his way to becoming LatAm’s most famous artist in history. He was Spotify’s most streamed artist in the world in 2020 and 2021 and released the first-ever All-Spanish album to top Billboard’s Top 200 chart.

This year, he’s already breaking another record: his tour has generated an estimated $120M so far, way more than any other artist. For perspective, the only Latin artists’ tours who have come closer since 2010 are Aventura at $24M, Luis Miguel at $44M, and Shakira at $40M. Bad Bunny tops them all, combined, in just the first half of a year. Whether you like his music or not, Bad Bunny is a force to be reckoned with by bringing Spanish music to the masses like no one else has.

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