Regional Mexican music is crossing borders and going global. Here’s how it happened

MEXICO CITY (news agencies) — Regional Mexican music — a catchall term that encompasses mariachi, banda, corridos, norteño, sierreño and other genres — has become a global phenomenon, topping music charts and reaching new audiences as it crosses borders.

While it has been around the U.S. for decades, with the late Selena Quintanilla weaving pop, disco and R&B rhythms into her Tejano music in the ’80s and ’90s, something extraordinary happened in the last year.

Eslabon Armado and Peso Pluma’s “Ella Baila Sola” single surpassed a billion streams on Spotify last month, becoming the first regional Mexican Top 10 hit on Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100, peaking at No. 4. Days later, Bad Bunny’s collaboration with Grupo Frontera, “Un x100to,” hit No. 5.

According to Luminate’s 2023 end-of-year report, four of the six Latin artists to reach 1 billion audio streams in the U.S. were Mexican artists: Peso Pluma, Eslabon Armado, Junior H and Fuerza Regida. They were in the top 125 artists streamed. Overall, regional Mexican music grew 60% in the U.S., accounting for a whopping 21.9 billion on-demand audio streams.

How did this happen? media reached out to musicians, producers and industry experts to get a sense of the evolution of regional Mexican music ahead of the 66th Grammy Awards on Feb. 4.

Leila Cobo, Billboard’s chief content officer for Latin music coverage, always believed Mexican music was going to be huge in the U.S., given its large Mexican American population.

“But I never, in a million years, thought it was going to become so global,” she says.

For Cobo, one of the factors contributing to regional Mexican music’s global reach is streaming, which democratized listening habits and allowed listeners who might not otherwise come across this music to fall in love with it.

On Spotify, Mexican music grew 400% worldwide over the last five years, according to Uriel Waizel, lead editor at Spotify Mexico. And on YouTube, Peso Pluma bested Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny to become 2023’s most streamed artist on the platform.

In addition to streaming, Cobo points at a large population of Mexican descent in the U.S. interested in exploring the music of their ancestors — and a new generation of musicians embracing the genre but mixing it up with rap, reggaeton and electronic instrumentation, invigorating it in the process.

“It went from being music that was a little bit old-fashioned,” Cobo says. “But now I see a movement. And I think that is exciting.”

Waizel says that while Mexican music is centuries old, “current Mexican music is breaking because it is the music that young people listen to.”

Spotify confirmed that last month, 56% of those listening to Latin American artists were under 30. In Mexico, that jumps to 60% of listeners.

“Before, parents taught regional music to their children, but now the young people are the ones who are teaching their parents music,” says DannyLux, a 19-year-old singer of sad sierreño, a novelty subgenre that surfaced almost five years ago. “Regional music is reaching the heights of reggaeton, which was not seen before.”

For Grammy-winning producer Édgar Barrera, to understand regional Mexican music, listeners must first understand that “it is a movement” finally having its “moment to shine globally,” because regional Mexican artists now encompass a variety of genres and sounds.

He cites the cumbias of Grupo Frontera and the corridos tumbados of Peso Pluma, both with very different lyrical approaches: “And they are doing numbers that the American artists are doing.”

Artists like Frontera, Fuerza Regida and Junior H are selling out “the same venues that Drake goes to a week later,” he says.

Barrera believes part of the cross-border appeal is that these regional Mexican genres are founded in live instrumental performance — guitars, tubas, trombones, trumpets and more.

“They are real musicians, they are people making real music, not a computer where you are programming or grabbing something from a sound library,” he says.

Last summer, at the Premios Juventud awards show in Puerto Rico, Mexican singer-songwriter Carín León wore a t-shirt that read “F— Regional,” an apparent reference to the phrase “regional Mexican music,” and later published a manifesto chastising the ways in which different types of Mexican folk music have been restricted by the term.