"Despacito": The Song That Globalized Latin Music

If Gasolina kicked open the door for reggaeton in 2004, "Despacito" walked the genre straight onto the throne of global pop. Released in 2017 by the Puerto Rican singer Luis Fonsi featuring Daddy Yankee, it became the biggest Latin song in history and a genuine worldwide phenomenon.^[1]

A pop-reggaeton fusion

"Despacito" was made available for digital download on 13 January 2017.^[1] Its sound was a carefully crafted hybrid: Luis Fonsi’s melodic pop sensibility joined to the reggaeton rhythm and rapped verses of Daddy Yankee — by then a veteran "King of Reggaeton" — over an acoustic-guitar hook and a dembow-rooted beat.^[1] The result was smooth, sensual, and irresistibly catchy, engineered for both Latin dance floors and global pop radio.

A few months after release, a remix featuring the Canadian pop star Justin Bieber propelled the song to the top of the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, where it spent sixteen weeks at number one — a near-unprecedented run for a largely Spanish-language record.^[1]

A YouTube and streaming juggernaut

"Despacito" rewrote the record books of the streaming era. Its music video became the most-watched video in YouTube history, the first ever to surpass 7 billion views (it has since passed 9 billion), and the song was certified Diamond by the RIAA for sales and streams equivalent to over ten million copies.^[1] For a time in 2017 it was, by the metrics of the digital age, simply the biggest song in the world.

A watershed for Latin music

The song’s deeper significance lies in what it proved. "Despacito" was a breakthrough moment that demonstrated Spanish-language records could dominate the global charts without translation — that the world would embrace Latin music on its own linguistic terms.^[1] Coming from the same Puerto Rican reggaeton lineage that artists had built up from the underground over two decades, it validated the genre’s commercial power at the highest possible level.

In its wake, the floodgates opened: the Latin urban explosion of the late 2010s and 2020s — the era in which reggaeton-rooted artists became fixtures of the global charts and streaming platforms — was built on the path "Despacito" cleared.^[2]

Why it matters

"Despacito" matters as the moment Latin urban music became, unambiguously, global pop. Where earlier reggaeton hits had crossed over, "Despacito" didn’t just cross over — it took over, topping charts and breaking records on every continent. It marks the point at which the genre that began in the caseríos of Puerto Rico became one of the dominant sounds on earth, and it remains the single most consequential record in reggaeton’s rise from the margins to the global mainstream.