Record sales figures prove that Latin pop is the only major contemporary genre that is consistently growing its audience base, and doing so among an Anglo-Saxon audience that has long been indifferent to it. Who is responsible for this boom? The Latin pop success story in a nutshell.
Record sales for almost every popular music genre in the United States fell in 2006, except for one, which was up 5 percent from the year before. Even if the genre breakdown of artists is somewhat necessarily forced, it doesn’t change the point – Latin pop is more popular in America than ever. And not only there, since after the successes of Shakira and Ricky Martin, last year Juanes, RBD and other artists in this category also enjoyed considerable success in other parts of the world, such as Europe, so it is not at all out of place to take a look at this less visible segment of pop music.
What we call Latin pop has not always been a uniform practice. Some have argued that the entire pop scene of all countries belonging to the Latin language group can be included, while others – typically Anglo-Saxon Americans – have tended to limit the use of the term to the pop music scene of the Hispanic population in the United States. Over the years, the music of Latin American, Spanish, Portuguese, occasionally Italian and French pop artists has come to be called Latin pop, but it is primarily countries belonging to the Hispanic cultural group that are usually included. (True, pop songs with Latin American or Spanish musical stylistic features can be given the label regardless of the nationality of the artists, but for now we will concentrate on actual Latin pop.)
The first Hispanic rock and roll star was Ritchie Valens, who died tragically young along with Buddy Holly, and after his death Trini Lopez became the biggest hit with Mexican-Americans (also known as Latinos or Chicanos), but her biggest success was with songs in English. Like him, the Chicano rock classics of the sixties were also written in English (Chan Romero: Hippy Hippy Shake, Sam The Sham & The Pharaohs: Wooly Bully, ? and the Mysterians: 96 Tears), and then Carlos Santana became the first world star of Spanish-speaking Americans, and no one promoted Latin music better than him. (We will not discuss the Brazilian artists who became international stars in the 1960s, nor Julio Iglesias and other Spanish hit singers – they were sometimes hugely successful in North America and Europe, but did not develop a consistent audience base comparable to that of today’s Latin pop artists.)
Although there have been many other Latin influences on Anglo-Saxon dominated pop/rock music, it has not been long since a true crossover star, combining genres, has risen to the level of being equally popular with the non-Latino population. The first to do so was Gloria Estefan, who blended the disco music of the 1980s with Cuban rhythms, initially as lead singer of Miami Sound Machine and later as a solo artist. She also needed English-language success to become one of the biggest stars of the era by the end of the 1980s, and from then on it was not only Latin music lovers who bought her records, which sold more than 70 million copies worldwide, even though she has recently become less active and her popularity has faded somewhat. In any case, he is considered a forerunner of the later global Latin pop craze.
Similarly, Cuban-born pop star Jon Secada, who worked with Estefan and then took over from him, was the Latin pop star in charge in the mid-1990s, with English-language songs and 20 million albums sold, most of which were bought by non-Spanish-speaking fans.