What happens to the landscape of American entertainment when the superstar under the nation’s spotlight doesn’t perform in English? In front of nearly 129 million viewers, Bad Bunny delivered his 14-minute Super Bowl LX halftime performance almost exclusively in Spanish, transforming the most-watched spectacle in American culture into a stage for Latin identity. This moment epitomized a shift in global power: the cultural authenticity of Bad Bunny trumped the Super Bowl’s unspoken mandate for an English-only performance.
To understand why this moment matters, it is important to distinguish between two levels of cultural control: symbolic authority and structural infrastructure. The former determines whose language, aesthetics, and narratives dominate, while the latter determines who owns the platforms, distribution systems, and revenue streams. Latin music’s rise suggests a shift in symbolic authority. Spanish songs top global charts repeatedly, and artists like Bad Bunny increasingly center their work around local rhythms, slang, and cultural identity. In effect, the linguistic hierarchy that once defined global success appears to be weakening.
Yet, the very infrastructure through which much of this transformation unfolds remains overwhelmingly U.S.-based. Streaming platforms, digital distribution systems, and advertising markets are still dominated and run by the West. This creates a unique paradox where the path to cultural independence must still be paved by Western technology. Artists like Bad Bunny have managed to successfully leverage these same platforms to bypass traditional U.S. record-label gatekeeping and reach global audiences. But while they have rejected assimilation, they have not done away with the platforms themselves. This raises a deeper question: if Latin artists can dominate global charts without translating their music, who ultimately controls the system that makes dominance possible?
One compelling answer lies in the theory of digital colonialism. While cultural expression may appear decentralized, the digital infrastructure through which it circulates remains highly concentrated. This is precisely what digital colonialism characterizes: global cultural production can generate success on platforms whose ownership ultimately remains rooted in Western technological power. Whereas classical colonialism controlled land, infrastructure, labor, and raw materials, digital colonialism is all about the control of platforms, cloud servers, algorithms, data, intellectual property, and distribution systems. The “territory” today is indeed digital infrastructure. Data in this way is treated like a natural resource that is collected, processed, monetized, used to train AI, converted into a service, and sold back to users. A dependence is then created when countries of the Global South use U.S.-owned platforms, store data on US-owned cloud servers, and operate under US-owned software licenses. This technological dependence existed long before algorithms and cloud servers structured access to it.
For much of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, global pop music operated under an implicit rule: global success required English. It wasn’t until the “Latin Explosion” of the 1990s and early 2000s, with Ricky Martin’s performance at the 1999 Grammy Awards, that Latin music finally made its breakthrough. Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony followed, achieving similar levels of success.
However, the time of Latin music stardom was short-lived, and only a few years after the start of the so-called “Latin Explosion” artists were pressured to cross over into English to secure mainstream success. Even apparent breakthroughs like Daddy Yankee’s 2004 hit song “Gasolina”, which broke U.S. charts without fully assimilating linguistically, remained an outlier to the general trend. Structurally, the industry was still not ready.
By the early 2000s, music went digital, and piracy in Latin America became widespread. Physical albums and record purchases were replaced by illegal downloads. Major labels grew hesitant to invest heavily in non-English markets. As a result, Latin artists received less funding, had fewer promotional campaigns, and saw less international expansion. So, even when Latin music was culturally visible, it remained structurally fragile. The “Latin Explosion” never fundamentally altered who controlled the global music industry. Instead, U.S. hegemony persisted, maintaining its control over distribution and investment even when profits declined.
At the same time, digital colonialism alone cannot fully account for the unprecedented rise of Latin music topping global charts in the late 2010s. In 2017, Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s song “Despacito” became the most-streamed song in history. In an interview with CNN in 2017, Fonsi explained that recognition on the Billboard Hot 100 is quite difficult for non-English artists and, “…that is very special, that we are able to break that language barrier and connect people through music.” The success of “Despacito” was as much cultural as it was infrastructural. The song’s success coincided with the rise of streaming culture, which fundamentally reshaped the global music industry.
Arguably, one of the most significant impacts of streaming platforms has been the democratization of access to music. In the pre-digital era, the US was able to keep its stronghold as the hegemon of the music industry because access was shaped by geography, physical distribution, and prime. Streaming, on the other hand, eliminated many of these barriers. For a select monthly subscription fee, users now have access to vast digital libraries expanding access to different languages, genres, and regions.
Now, this expanded access reshaped consumption and expanded the discovery of new artists. Streaming platforms began using algorithmically curated playlists like Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” and Apple Music’s personalized recommendations to introduce listeners to artists they may never have actively listened to. For Latin music, this shift has been transformative. Reggaeton and Latin trap styles have been able to scale and stream beyond local markets. On Spotify’s Global 200 list, names like Bad Bunny and J. Balvin consistently rank among the most-streamed artists in the world.
However, democratization in this way is not absolute. Even though access to different genres, styles, and artists expanded, gatekeeping persists, platforms themselves remain centralized under the grip of Western conglomerates, and a system that had previously been executive-driven has transformed into a data-driven one. In this way, streaming may have redistributed symbolic authority, but it did not fully redistribute structural control. If non-Western streaming platforms accumulate comparable influence to their US counterparts, the very foundation of the global music industry may crumble. However, for now, Latin music’s dominance has unfolded within largely U.S.-controlled markets and infrastructures.
Featured Image Source: Billboard