Tego Calderón, who was really the person who brought reggaeton to the mainstream in Puerto Rico before “Gasolina,” has a song called “Loíza” in which he talks about institutional racism in Puerto Rico. Reggaeton provided a space to talk about those issues. But when you look at things like who has access to education, or at housing segregation, it’s very clear Afro-Puerto Ricans are discriminated against. In Puerto Rico, there’s a sense that the island’s trinity of races-black, Spanish, and indigenous-has produced a harmonious society with no racism. My book talks specifically about the Puerto Rican context. There’s debate about the origins: Did Puerto Ricans make reggaeton or did Panamanians make reggaeton? One of the things that brings all of these things together is that many of these musics come from urban, predominantly black, working-class communities-whether they’re from Kingston or Panama City or New York or San Juan. A very basic idea of what ingredients produced reggaeton would be hip-hop coming from the U.S., dancehall based out of Jamaica, and a type of music called reggae en español from Panama in particular. Rivera-Rideau: We wouldn’t have reggaeton if we didn’t have complicated historical patterns of migration in the Caribbean basin. Kornhaber: Your book is partly about the racial dynamics in reggaeton. But his two songs that are popular now, especially “Shaky Shaky,” sound a lot more like the mid-2000s reggaeton with a very common dancehall loop in it. He’s become more dance-pop in a lot of ways. If you listen to Daddy Yankee’s catalog from when he was an underground artist to now, there’s definitely a shift in his sound.
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Since “Gasolina,” he’s had many albums and several hits, including some success this year with two other songs, “Shaky Shaky” and “Hula Hoop.” Daddy Yankee was part of one of those groups and was quite popular. Rivera-Rideau: One of the things that’s important about Daddy Yankee is that he had a successful career before “Gasolina.” Reggaeton in Puerto Rico in the ’90s circulated informally for a while and was called “underground.” There were several crews somewhat analogous with hip-hop, with different DJs that would have artists rapping on them. Kornhaber: For a lot of Americans, the last the time they’ve heard of Daddy Yankee was in 2004 with “Gasolina.” What has he been doing since then? “This genre has moved from being maligned and censored to being the No. It is true that reggaeton has a reputation of having misogynistic and explicitly sexual lyrics, and “Despacito” doesn’t have have such explicit lyrics-but it’s obviously a very sexual song. I’m not sure that I totally buy such stark divisions between reggaeton before and pop-fusion now. Now that reggaeton has broken into the mainstream of Latin music, there has been a lot of discussion saying that it has shifted its orientation lyrically: that before it was hyper-sexualized and connected to the street and politics but now it’s not. And it’s pretty different in terms of its melody.
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There’s that guitar riff in the song that you hear in a lot of Latin pop. Most reggaeton is rapped and not sung Luis Fonsi is singing not rapping. “Despacito” definitely has that, but there are some differences. The main thing that people think about when they think about reggaeton is the beat-the boom-ch-boom-chick beat. Rivera-Rideau: In the media, the song’s been presented as “reggaeton-pop fusion” or “urban-pop fusion,” which are phrases that have been attached to Ricky Martin or Enrique Iglesias or other pop singers. Kornhaber: Am I right to be calling it reggaeton? How does it showcase the genre or diverge from it? “They overindex in terms of hits, but underindex in terms of payment.The Blockbuster That Hollywood Was Afraid to Make David Sims
#Luis fonsi despacito free#
“They’re hugely important but most of the music streamed there will be on free because of low levels of disposable income,” says Mulligan. The financial impact of Fonsi’s success is complicated by how much of his popularity stems from Latin American countries like Brazil and Mexico, the world’s second and third largest streaming markets respectively. "That’s a fundamental issue that facing streaming,” says Mark Mulligan, managing director of London-based MiDiA Research, adding that the music industry is hoping YouTube will “develop its role so that revenue matches scale of consumption.”
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On average, YouTube pays out significant less than Apple Music and Spotify, because the video website shares ad revenue instead of paying per stream. But the actual figure is likely to be way less, given that almost 2.7 billion of “Despacito’s” streams come from YouTube-where it’s the fourth most played video of all time. Assuming that Fonsi made $0.008 per stream-the high end of industry estimates when it comes to Spotify royalties-he’d have taken home royalties to the tune of $36.8 million as of this summer.