At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Latin American and U.S. Latino popular music seemed unstoppable. Ricky Martin’s electrifying performance in the 1999 Grammy Awards ceremony landed him a Time magazine cover and countless media appearances. Martin’s achievement paved the way for a cadre of Latin/o American artists who found commercial success in the United States and beyond with English-language pop albums. The artists of the so-called “Latin explosion,” who, besides Martin included Marc Anthony, Jennifer Lopez, Enrique Iglesias, and Shakira, followed the model of 1980s crossover stars Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine. This is not coincidental; Miami Sound Machine founder and Gloria’s husband Emilio Estefan Jr. produced several of the “Latin explosion” albums. The tenants of Estefan’s crossover model include the use of standard American verse–chorus song format; the incorporation of subdued Latin American music influences, such as the syncopated keyboard of salsa (derived from the salsa montuno; see Chapter 5), nylon-string guitar runs, and —most importantly—lyrics in English, peppered with a few easy-to-pronounce Spanish words. The financial appeal for Latin/o Americans of reaching the U.S. Anglo music market is undeniable. The United States is the largest market for recorded music in the world, accounting for 27 percent of global revenues in 2008. By comparison, the largest Latin American market for music is Bazil (which represents 1.2 percent of global revenues), followed by Mexico (0.8 percent) and Argentina (0.3 percent). The urge to record in English was especially strong in the first decade of 2000 because the English-speaking United States has a long history of resistance to popular music in other languages. In 2007, for example, the Spanish-language album market represented only a modest 5 percent of total sales. However, this situation has changed over time. In 2017, the global phenomenon of the song “Despacito” by the pop Puerto Rican singer Luis Fonsi and featuring the reggaetón artist Daddy Yankee showed that Latin American music in Spanish could appeal to English-language audiences. In the years since, artists like Bad Bunny, Karol G, Feid, and Rauw Alejandro have done arena tours of the US with a repertoire sung exclusively in Spanish. And in 2023, Karol G debuted at number 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart with “Mañana será bonito,” the first Spanish-language album by a woman to achieve this.