And he does a lot of love songs, and girls love that.”īorn Benito Martínez Ocasio to working-class parents, he once packed supermarket bags for a living, and his lyrics are equally relatable: “It’s not just about cars and girls, it’s about everything,” Assad says. He can be quite deep, but he’s also the guy you want to hear in the middle of the night in a club, getting down and dirty.

“His punchlines are fantastic – he’s a very good writer. “He has a bit of everything,” says Jose Luis Seijas, music editor of UK magazine Latino Life. He loves the arts – he loves opera! My guy’s very unique.”

“I love the way he sees the musical court,” he says, as in tennis: “He sees things in music that I don’t understand, and six months or a year before anyone else. “His IQ for music is just astronomical,” says his manager and label head Noah Assad, who has worked with him since 2016. Meanwhile, Bad Bunny’s current (and superb) single Dakiti is the most-played in the world at time of writing, earning more than 7m plays each day, 3m more than Ariana Grande’s Positions in second place.īlowing apart these dry data points, though, is Bad Bunny himself – after all, there’s a reason why the rapper and singer has edged ahead of numerous other billion-streaming Latin stars such as J Balvin, Karol G, Maluma and Ozuna.

He appears nowhere in Spotify’s 50 most-played songs in the UK today, with Brits preferring Christmas classics and Gen Z pop stars such as Billie Eilish, Internet Money and 24kGoldn. Granted, he has featured on one UK Top 10 hit, but that was back in 2018, appearing on it for less than a minute: Cardi B’s I Like It. Drake, the Canadian rapper who has had six UK No 1 singles, was first in three of the previous five years, with fellow UK chart-toppers Ed Sheeran and Post Malone leading the others.īut in 2020, someone who has never had an album or solo single in the UK Top 100 is the world’s most popular artist: 26-year-old Puerto Rican vocalist Bad Bunny, streamed more than 8.3bn times this year on Spotify alone. E ach December, Spotify announces who has been the world’s most streamed artist that year, and this generally tallies with who has been popular in the UK.

Number one artist on spotify