Bad Bunny’s momentum is hitting an intense high. Fresh from a historic Grammy night, the groundbreaking Puerto Rican rapper, singer, and songwriter is now poised to take the biggest stage in America at the Super Bowl, cementing a 10-year rise that has reshaped the U.S. music industry.
In only a decade, the artist—real name Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—went from a SoundCloud rapper to a six-time Grammy winner, becoming the first Latin and Spanish-speaking musician to claim Album of the Year. Along his path to the Super Bowl, he has had a record-setting effect on the U.S. economy.
Since 2018, he has gone on six concert tours. His most recent tour, No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí—translated to “I don’t want to leave here” in English—held at San Juan’s José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum (locally called “El Choli”), brought in an estimated $400 million from 31 shows, per . Beyond ticket sales, the 600,000 attendees of the residency contributed an estimated $733 million to Puerto Rico’s economy, according to the . His earlier tours also yielded large profits. His World’s Hottest Tour became the highest-grossing tour in a single calendar year, making over $435 million across 81 shows with 1.9 million tickets sold (though Taylor Swift broke that record the next year by nearly $600 million).
Bad Bunny has also been a repeat topper of Spotify’s global charts, most recently earning the title in 2025 with almost 20 billion streams.
This won’t be the singer’s first Super Bowl appearance. In 2020, the Puerto Rican native performed alongside Shakira and Jennifer Lopez. But since then, he has evolved from a featured artist to an international sensation $100 million.
From SoundCloud to the Super Bowl
Born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico—a municipality on the outskirts of San Juan—he was raised in a lower-middle-class home. His father was a truck driver, and his mother an English teacher. During college, he worked at a grocery store. In his free time, he uploaded self-made songs to SoundCloud, the world’s largest audio platform. In 2016, his track “Dile” surpassed one million streams. The then-22-year-old soon had producers flooding his phone with calls.
Bad Bunny’s journey from SoundCloud artist to global stardom was speeded up by strategic collaborations and a cultural moment primed for Latino artists. He broke into the mainstream American audience through team-ups with artists such as Cardi B and Drake. Those partnerships were a mutual trade-off for both Bad Bunny and the U.S. artists, per cultural historian Jared Bahir Browsh.
“They’re internationalizing their fan bases while he’s gaining a foothold in English-speaking countries through those collaborations,” Browsh told .
Leveraging international stardom for market expansion
The choice to have Bad Bunny perform at this year’s halftime show was a strategic move by the NFL and Roc Nation—Jay-Z’s entertainment company that has managed the halftime show since 2019—to capitalize on the artist’s global appeal. International viewers make up a big portion of the NFL’s audience. In a discussion with last November, Marissa Solis, the NFL’s senior vice president of global brand and consumer marketing, stated that the U.S. Latino population was a “critical growth area.”
Browsh pushes back against the idea that the NFL picked Bad Bunny as a political stunt. Last year, the artist for refusing to tour the U.S. over ICE concerns, sparking outrage among critics and leading to a spinoff halftime show by Turning Point USA, the conservative nonprofit founded by Charlie Kirk. Instead, Browsh said the NFL and Roc Nation’s selection of Bad Bunny was purely a business choice.
“He’s coming off a massive tour and he’s coming off being the top artist in terms of streaming and record sales last year,” Browsh said.
Latinos both in the U.S. and abroad are the NFL’s . And roughly one-third of the NFL’s fans are from outside the U.S., per . The NFL is embracing its fanbase’s changing demographics, launching a in 2022 to grow its international presence.
“It’s a business, so there’s always a tradeoff,” Browsh said regarding Bad Bunny’s halftime performance. “He gets the visibility of the biggest sporting event in the U.S., and they get access to those new markets.”