The Rise of Bad Bunny: How a Puerto Rican SoundCloud Rapper Became the World's Biggest Streaming Star

From Almirante Sur to the Econo Checkout Line

Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio grew up in Almirante Sur, a neighborhood of Vega Baja on Puerto Rico's north coast, singing in his church choir long before anyone called him Bad Bunny. By 2016 he was bagging groceries at a local supermarket to pay the bills, spending his off-hours uploading raw, unpolished tracks to SoundCloud under a stage name pulled from a childhood Easter photo of him dressed as a rabbit. There was no label, no studio budget. Just a kid behind a checkout counter and a laptop, betting the internet would find him before the register did.

"Diles" and the SoundCloud Discovery

The bet paid off. One of those SoundCloud uploads, "Diles," reached producer DJ Luian, who signed Martínez to his label Hear This Music and started pairing him with reggaetón and Latin trap's biggest names. By 2017, Bad Bunny hadn't released an album. He didn't need one yet: guest verses on Becky G's "Mayores" and Karol G's "Ahora Me Llama" put his voice on playlists across Latin America and the U.S. before he had a full-length project to his credit.

X100PRE: The Mixtape Rapper Becomes an Album Artist

Bad Bunny spent 2018 doing everything except releasing an album: hit guest spots, a Jimmy Fallon appearance where he spoke passionately about Puerto Rico, and "I Like It" with Cardi B and J Balvin, a Record of the Year Grammy nominee. Then, on Christmas Eve, he dropped X100PRE (Spanish shorthand for "por siempre," forever) with zero warning. KEXP's review at the time called it a statement of range rather than a hits grab, pointing to synth-pop detours alongside trap and reggaetón, guest spots from Ricky Martin, Drake and Diplo, and stretches of orchestral strings and guitar. The album debuted at No. 11 on the Billboard 200, respectable for a surprise release, and proof the SoundCloud rapper could hold an audience for fifteen tracks, not just one guest verse.

YHLQMDLG and the Yo Perreo Sola Turn

If X100PRE proved he could make an album, YHLQMDLG ("Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana," I do whatever I want) proved he could make a statement. Released in early 2020, the video for "Yo Perreo Sola" showed Bad Bunny in drag, dancing a reggaetón style historically built around women dancing for men, a pointed jab at a genre that has never been big on consent. Commercially, the album fell just short of history: it stalled at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 behind Lil Baby's My Turn on March 14, 2020, despite 116,000 equivalent album units and 145.94 million on-demand streams in its opening week, per Guinness World Records. What it missed on the all-genre chart, it made up on Billboard's Latin Albums chart, where it set a record for the longest reign at No. 1: a 70-week run that swallowed the entire first year of the pandemic.

El Último Tour Del Mundo Breaks the Billboard 200

Less than a year later, Bad Bunny finished what YHLQMDLG started. El Último Tour Del Mundo, his fourth studio album, arrived with sixteen tracks, every one entirely in Spanish, all co-written by Martínez himself. On December 12, 2020, it did what no album had done in the Billboard 200's 66-year history: it hit No. 1 without a single English-language song on the tracklist, according to Guinness World Records. Other Spanish-inflected albums had topped the chart before (Selena's Dreaming of You, Santana's Supernatural, Il Divo's Ancora), but none had been all-Spanish cover to cover. Singles like "Dákiti" with Jhay Cortez and "La Noche de Anoche" with Rosalía carried the album to a No. 1 debut, even though it slipped to No. 2 the following week and No. 9 the week after that. The milestone landed at the close of a year in which Bad Bunny had already become Spotify's most-streamed artist on the planet: a SoundCloud upload from Vega Baja was now setting chart records that English-language radio hits had defined for decades.

Un Verano Sin Ti: From Chart Record to Album of the Year Nominee

Two years later, Bad Bunny went bigger. Un Verano Sin Ti, released May 6, 2022, became the second all-Spanish-language album ever to reach No. 1 on the Billboard 200, per Hola!'s chart report, with 274,000 equivalent album units in its first week, the biggest album week of the year at that point and his best week ever. The real story was streaming: 356.66 million official U.S. streams made it the biggest streaming week for any Latin album in history, and Bad Bunny became the first artist ever to log more than 100 million total Spotify streams for eight consecutive days.

The album held No. 1 for 13 weeks, powered his World's Hottest Tour through stadiums like Miami's Hard Rock Stadium and SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, and in 2023 made history again: Un Verano Sin Ti became the first Spanish-language album ever nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year.

This four-album run is the one to know:

If you like this kind of track-by-chart-fact breakdown, our piece on Sabrina Carpenter's Man's Best Friend walks through a more recent album the same way.

The Most-Streamed Artist Alive

Add it up and the pattern is unmistakable: Bad Bunny was Spotify's global top artist in 2020, again in 2021, and again in 2022, a three-peat that made him, at the time, the only artist to ever hold the crown three years running. Taylor Swift took over in 2023 and 2024. Bad Bunny reclaimed the title a fourth time in 2025 behind DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOTos, the first artist ever to top Spotify's year-end global ranking four separate times, according to Spotify Newsroom. None of it happened because a label built him for English-language radio. It happened because a kid in Vega Baja uploaded songs to SoundCloud on his own schedule, kept writing in Spanish when the industry pushed Latin artists toward crossover records, and let reggaetón's dembow drive through the Billboard 200 instead of around it.

For the trap-adjacent side of that arc, our Hip-Hop quiz draws from the same lineage Bad Bunny came up alongside; if the pop-crossover side of his catalog is more your speed, the Pop quiz leans into the "I Like It" era instead.

SoundCloud-era believer or Un Verano Sin Ti latecomer, see how many of his eras, collaborators and chart records you can actually name when the music, not the headline, is the only clue.