“It’s a force to reckon with,” Yankee said. With “Con Calma” likely locked in as his next billion-stream single, and Latin urban resetting where and how stars are born today, expect many more pop singers to come calling. He’s not coming in as an underdog, but as an equal.” “New artists can pop organically in the Latin urban space, they don’t need the infrastructure of a major label,” Singh said. But he can collaborate and steer his career however he pleases. His label El Cartel has distribution deals with Universal Music Latin, and the “Con Calma” remix is getting a push from Perry’s end at Capitol Records. Not only is he a founding artist of reggaeton since the genre’s ‘90s inception, he’s also rare for owning his own master recordings. Yankee is an especially interesting artist to lead this wave. “Everyone’s benefiting from the cross-pollinating.” “This is an opportunity for Katy to appeal to a new audience, and open up markets in countries around the world,” he said. The way Singh sees it, the momentum of a song such as “Con Calma” is re-routing the flow of influence and star power. “The streaming numbers speak for themselves,” said Simran Singh, Yankee’s attorney and business partner who helped broker the Perry collaboration. With “Con Calma,” he’s found another one. “We were already playing the single, but he still asked, ‘Do you think I should get an English collaboration?’ The song is sexy as is, but he’s always searching for that hit.” “Two months ago, I had a meeting with Yankee to talk ‘Con Calma,’ ” recalls Santos. Add in Spotify, Apple Music and the rest, and one can credibly make a case that Yankee is the biggest star on “Con Calma” right now. The original “Con Calma” (and its Animoji dance video) has close to 800 million YouTube streams already, with the remix tacking on another 35 million so far. Yankee, whose 2004 single “Gasolina” helped first popularize reggaeton, has billions of streams on YouTube alone. Urbano’s prowess on streaming makes it a powerhouse any way you define it. But when done right, “it shines the correct light on Latino artists.” If collaborators join up cynically, “artists will be criticized,” Santos added. Singles such as “Con Calma” aren’t just meeting a young, diverse audience where they live: They’re pushing all of pop music in its direction. “Beyoncé is singing en español with J Balvin, and so is Alicia Keys with Pedro Capó and Farruko,” said Enrique Santos, the chairman and chief creative officer of iHeartLatino, the radio and streaming platform. They didn’t have to “cross over” - the U.S. The original music video, with Yankee as a particularly limber Animoji, came with its own dance craze that helped the song instantly go viral on YouTube, TikTok and other platforms.Įven the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival put Balvin and Daddy Yankee’s Puerto Rican peer Bad Bunny near the top of the main stage bill at this year’s festival. Snow himself shows up too, with Perry on a new hook that harks back to her 2010 hit “California Gurls.” (Even if Perry’s frothy lyrics such as “Hola, me llamo Katy / A little mezcal got me feelin’ naughty / I know that we don’t speak the same language / So I’m gonna let my body talk for me” have drawn mild rebuke from Latin critics.)īut the song’s reggaeton churn (from Dallas production duo Play-N-Skillz) is fresh enough for modern nightclubs from Yankee’s San Juan to Perry’s Santa Barbara (via Snow’s Toronto). The remix of “Con Calma” is an inside-out revision of “Informer.” It puts Yankee on the now-in-Spanish hook from the original, which Yankee said changed how he saw Caribbean styles interacting with pop. “When travel and play, they hear our music all over the world. “It’s a global movement now,” Yankee, 42, said. Now it’s the pop singers who are eager to tap into its audience.
The era- and genre-spanning collaboration says a lot about how Latin urbano music is reshaping the industry.
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