Bad Bunny

He was bagging groceries at an Econo supermarket in Puerto Rico when DJ Luian found 'Diles' on SoundCloud and signed him to Hear This Music. That was 2016, and the trajectory was almost comically steep. By the end of the year, 'Soy Peor' had made him the dominant voice in Latin trap, a genre most American labels still hadn't figured out how to monetize. The Cardi B collaboration 'I Like It' hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2018, but he never adjusted his sound to get there. He kept making music in Spanish and let the market catch up.

His 2025 album Debi Tirar Mas Fotos won Album of the Year at the 2026 Grammys, the first Spanish-language record to take the top prize. None of it was a coincidence. He headlined the Super Bowl LX halftime show the same month, the first solo Latino artist to do it, and 'DtMF' hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 that week with four Bad Bunny songs in the top 10. He's been Spotify's most-streamed artist across multiple years, all in Spanish. The Adidas collabs, Gucci campaigns, and Calvin Klein ambassadorship tell you the negotiating leverage has shifted well beyond tour revenue.

He sang in the Catholic church choir until 13, which makes about as much sense as his stage name, which came from a moment when someone forced him to wear a bunny costume and he resented it. He dropped out of audiovisual communications school at the University of Puerto Rico after failing most of his exams, though he's said he wanted to be an artist anyway. In 2020, he wore a skirt on The Tonight Show with 'They killed Alexa, not a man in a skirt' on his T-shirt, a protest against the murder of trans woman Alexa Negron Luciano. The activism was already there before the fame made it easy.