Chartmetric data as of: Jan 29, 2018 | Chartmetric daily podcast

“Latin music has truly become a universal language. We want to not only celebrate, but continue to foster that growth by bringing fans one step closer to their favorite Latin artists, while giving emerging artists a platform to reach new ears.” — Rocio Guerrero, Head of Global Cultures at Spotify (via Spotify blog)

So despite Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s 2018 Grammy performance as well as their three landmark nominations (Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Pop Duo/Group Performance), “Despacito” didn’t win any of them, surprising many due to its unprecedented success as a Latin song on the global stage.

Since we’re into data here at Chartmetric, let’s explore the bigger picture from a numbers angle.

In our Dec 2017 Latin boy band deep dive, we learned there were ~559 million Spanish speakers worldwide. According to the US Census in mid-2016, there were 57.5 million Hispanic people within the leading music market in the world (closely mirroring the 52.6 million Spanish speakers Instituto Cervantes estimated in the US). At the time, that was about 17.8% of the total US population (323.4 million), making them the “largest ethnic or racial minority” in the States.

Or, to Spotify: a really, really good market opportunity- one projected to grow to 119 million in the US alone (28.6%) by 2060.

Enter: Viva Latino, Spotify’s premiere brand for the best in today’s Latin music. When we explored RapCaviar back in Nov 2017, Spotify’s owned and operated rap playlist campaign was well underway: slick in-house content & graphics, vertical mobile-phone optimized videos, and a live concert series to boot, as The Verge’s Micah Singleton showed us. It is Spotify’s way of diversifying their revenue streams in what is still a complicated and highly political digital music environment.