"Despacito": The Song That Globalized Latin Music

If Gasolina opened the global door for reggaeton in 2004, "Despacito" carried the genre to the center of worldwide pop a decade later. Recorded by the Puerto Rican singer Luis Fonsi with the Puerto Rican rapper Daddy Yankee, the 2017 single is among the most commercially successful Spanish-language tracks in the history of popular music and the recording most often credited with carrying Latin music into the mainstream.^[1]

A pop-reggaeton fusion

Issued on 13 January 2017 as the lead single from Fonsi's album Vida, "Despacito" was the product of a cross-border collaboration: Fonsi wrote it with the Panamanian-Brazilian songwriter Erika Ender between 2015 and 2016, working alongside Daddy Yankee, and the Colombian producers Mauricio Rengifo and Andrés Torres built the track.^[1] Its design fused Fonsi's melodic pop line and an acoustic-guitar hook to Yankee's rapped verses and a dembow-rooted pulse — an arrangement calibrated for the Latin social floor and for international radio at once.^[1]

The reach widened with an English-language remix featuring the Canadian pop singer Justin Bieber, released on 17 April 2017 with new lyrics. That version drove the record to the top of charts worldwide; in all, "Despacito" reached number one in forty-seven countries, among them the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.^[1]

A streaming-era benchmark

The single also reset the metrics of the digital era. Its music video became, for a period, the most-watched video on YouTube, on a platform where every clip to top that ranking since 2009 has been a music video.^[1] By the standards of streaming-age popularity, "Despacito" stood for a time as the dominant song on the global market — a position no prior Spanish-language record had held.

A watershed for Latin music

The record's deeper importance lies in what it demonstrated. Music journalists have identified "Despacito" as the most instrumental single in spreading Spanish-language music into the international mainstream — evidence that a track need not be translated to command audiences across languages.^[1] Drawn from the same Puerto Rican reggaeton lineage that performers had built up from the underground across two decades, it confirmed the genre's commercial weight at the highest level the charts can register.

In its wake came the broader Latin-urban expansion of the late 2010s and 2020s, in which reggaeton-rooted artists became fixtures of the global charts and streaming services.^[2]

Why it matters

"Despacito" matters as the point at which Latin urban music became, without qualification, global pop. Earlier reggaeton hits had crossed into foreign markets; this one topped charts and set records across continents, carrying a sound rooted in the caseríos of Puerto Rico to a worldwide audience. It remains the most consequential single in reggaeton's passage from the margins to the center of the international mainstream.