Last September, after a sold-out summer residency of 31 concerts in his native San Juan, Bad Bunny announced that he would not be playing any shows in the United States during his 2026 world tour because of the looming threat of ICE to his predominantly Hispanic fan base. But two weeks later, another announcement marked a rather large exception—the 31-year-old King of Latin Trap had been chosen to headline the halftime show of Super Bowl LX in San Francisco.
While Bad Bunny’s selection drew a predictable amount of MAGA backlash, including from President Donald Trump, it also signals the arrival of Latin music as a cultural force, and its importance in the NFL’s increasingly global ambitions. According to Spotify, the genre has increased in popularity by 2,500% over the past decade, from accounting for 8% of all streams on the platform to an impressive 27% now. Bad Bunny, who racked up 19.8 billion streams in 2025, was Spotify’s most-streamed artist of the year.
“I think that there was absolutely a market decision behind selecting Bad Bunny,” says Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, a professor of Latin American studies at the University of Wisconsin who has collaborated with Bad Bunny to incorporate Puerto Rican history into his shows and music videos. “The NFL wants to expand internationally, so they are looking to target a broader market beyond the United States. He has a huge following in the United States, but this stage will also be amplified internationally by having someone like him.”
The Super Bowl halftime performance on February 8 will cap a career year for the Grammy-winning superstar—born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—who, in addition to the sold-out residency in Puerto Rico, starred in a pair of Hollywood movies alongside Adam Sandler (Happy Gilmore 2) and Austin Butler (Caught Stealing). In total, Forbes estimates that Bad Bunny earned $66 million in 2025, before taxes and fees, good enough for No. 10 on the list of the world’s highest-paid musicians.
But the halftime show won’t add a penny to his pockets.
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As has been the standard for many years, Super Bowl headliners perform for free—outside of the union-mandated minimum of a couple hundred dollars—in exchange for what is seen as perhaps the most valuable marketing opportunity in all of entertainment, a 12-to-15-minute promotional spotlight that will be watched by hundreds of millions of people. Last year’s performance by Kendrick Lamar averaged 133.5 million viewers and has rung up 157 million views on YouTube.
The economic upside can be enormous. Spotify reported that Lamar’s hit song “Not Like Us” saw a 430% increase in streams after last year’s game, and he used the momentum to launch a stadium tour with Super Bowl co-headliner SZA that grossed nearly $360 million in ticket sales in 2025, according to Pollstar. It was enough to make Lamar the fourth-highest-earning musician in the world last year, at $109 million before taxes and fees. And SZA’s 2025 wasn’t too shabby, either—she finished the year as the 20th-highest-paid musician, earning $34 million.
The Super Bowl bump is so valuable that recent halftime artists, including The Weeknd in 2021 and Dr. Dre in 2022, have offered to spend millions of dollars of their own money to make the production especially memorable, supplementing a budget covered by the NFL and Apple Music that often exceeds $10 million.
Since 2019, the NFL and Apple have given much of the artist selection responsibility to Roc Nation and its cofounder, Jay-Z, who has increased the diversity among headlining acts. Selecting Bad Bunny for this year’s show takes that initiative a step further, given that it will be the first Super Bowl Halftime Show performed primarily in another language. “Spanish is part of me; it’s in my DNA,” Bad Bunny told Forbes in 2023. “I like speaking it wherever I go—not to force it on people, but because it’s who I am.”
Meléndez-Badillo believes Bad Bunny’s passion for the language and culture of Puerto Rico has endeared him to fans, not only on the island but around the world, who see his lack of compromise as a defiant act of pride. “Benito is like that cousin, that primo, that made it,” Meléndez-Badillo says. “When we see him perform at stages such as the Super Bowl, we’re seeing ourselves.”
Given Bad Bunny’s views about the Trump administration’s immigration policy, many have speculated that he will use the global spotlight not only to sell tour tickets and promote his music, but also to make a political statement. Vanessa Diaz, a professor at Loyola Marymount University and author of the upcoming book How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance, says that “everything about this performance is going to be political.”
The addition of Green Day to the lineup only furthered the speculation, given that lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong has been vocal in his opposition to Trump and ICE’s policies in Minnesota. The president told the New York Post last week that he won’t attend the game while voicing his displeasure with the halftime performers. “I’m anti-them,” Trump said. “I think it’s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred. Terrible.” (And according to Homeland Security advisor Corey Lewandowski, ICE will be on patrol during Bad Bunny’s halftime performance.)
“Usually, artists who get really political can get critiqued for being very political, and it can actually negatively impact their kind of reception,” Diaz says, “whereas with Bad Bunny, it’s been the opposite. It’s like he’s gotten more popular and more political—and more popular and political.”
That is likely to continue with Super Bowl LX, which will put him in front of millions of viewers who have likely never listened to his music before—or for that matter, any Spanish-language music. And if history is a reliable prediction market, the platform will take Bad Bunny to new career heights.
“I think that the Super Bowl really is the one last thing for anyone who didn’t know who Bad Bunny is, is going to know who Bad Bunny is,” Diaz says. “This is a halftime show we’re going to be talking about for the rest of my existence because it’s going to be so significant in terms of what it represents in the broader context of history of the halftime show, but also specifically in this moment. No one else could have done what Bad Bunny is about to do.”