Bad Bunny Babel

The Spanish language is exploding all over pop culture

Pop star icons such as Puerto Rico's Bad Bunny and Mexico's Peso Pluma are helping to propel the Spanish language into previously uncharted territory in the world of pop culture. For the third consecutive year, Bad Bunny is the most streamed musician on Spotify. Frequently, the top 3 or 4 songs on the Spotify streaming platform are Spanish language songs. Six of Netflix's top 10 non-English language shows are in Spanish. It seems that in pop culture today, the Spanish language is eating the world.

Latin America keeps it social

Latin America is one of the most internet savvy regions in the world. There are half a billion smart phones in Latin America, and Latin Americans spend more time on social media than do populations from most other regions. These phenomena have helped to fuel the rise in popularity of Latin American artists in streaming media; word-of-mouth and the network effect are propelling artists all over the Latin American world. Popular artists and shows are crashing through international boundaries. This international influence has made Bad Bunny - an artist from a Caribbean island with a population of a little over 3 million - the biggest pop star in the world; good luck finding an internet-connected Spanish speaking youth who doesn't know and listen to Bad Bunny.

Bad Bunny is such a cultural force, that in 2022 when TicketMaster oversold tickets to his back-to-back concerts in Mexico City's Estadio Azteca (the largest stadium in Latin America), the president of Mexico offered to pay for the equipment and logistics if Bad Bunny would stay and perform one additional concert to make up for TicketMaster's mistakes (Bad Bunny did not accept the president's offer).

The numbers game

There are approximately half a billion native Spanish speakers in the world, making Spanish the second most spoken language in the world (Mandarin is first; Hindi may have more speakers than Spanish, but that has not been accurately determined). And Spanish speakers residing outside of predominantly Spanish speaking countries (such as the United States) do a really good job at passing their language and culture down to their children. In the U.S., 72% of people with Latin American roots speak Spanish.

What about people without Latin American roots, who are not Spanish speakers? Well, they're learning Spanish! The popular language learning apps Duolingo and Babbel report that Spanish is second only to English as the most popular language that people are learning. In fact, Babbel saw an increase of 42% in Spanish learners between 2022 and 2023. Latin American pop culture is a key driver for all this interest in learning Spanish.

The audience for Spanish language content is growing, and not only in Spanish speaking countries, and not only in pace with native speaker population growth. Latin culture is a booming business in the arts and media today. And platforms like Netflix and Spotify are, increasingly, engaging the world with a Spanish tongue.