The First Spanish-Language Album to Reach Number One: El Último Tour del Mundo, Bad Bunny, and the Billboard 200

Authors

  • Christopher Joseph Westgate Johnson & Wales University

Keywords:

Bad Bunny, Billboard, music industry, Spanish-language music, youth cultures

Abstract

In 2020, Bad Bunny released El Último Tour del Mundo, the first Spanish-language album to claim the top spot in the multi-decade history of the Billboard 200 album chart. Scholars have written about Spanish-language music and industry charts, but the question of how that album reached number one in a geo-linguistic context where many listeners do not understand Spanish remains unanswered. This article contends that English-language textual and paratextual markers have been overlooked for their significant role in helping to make the predominantly Spanish-language album successful in the United States. Its discourse analysis shows how an artist works to upend the music industry’s long-standing dependency on any one language to reach mainstream audiences.

Author Biography

Christopher Joseph Westgate, Johnson & Wales University

Christopher Joseph Westgate, Ph.D. is a media scholar whose research program includes digital cultures, histories of media, Latinx media, popular music, and sound studies. His articles have been published in Popular Music & Society; Media, Culture & Society; and elsewhere. Dr. Westgate is currently a professor of Media and Communication Studies at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. He has more than a decade of experience in the radio industry.

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Published

2024-02-27

Issue

Vol. 18 (2024)

Section

Articles

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