The 21st Century: Medellín, World Capital of Reggaeton (2000–present)

Reggaeton was born in Puerto Rico in the nineties, at the crossroads between Spanish rap and Jamaican reggae tracks, in the neighborhoods of San Juan and Ponce where musicians like Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, and Tego Calderón built the sound that would define Latin popular music of the 21st century. It arrived in Medellín at the end of the nineties through the same channels by which all new music reached Latin American cities before the internet: piracy, early downloads, niche radio that dared to play what the big stations were not yet playing.

What happened in Medellín with that material was the same process that had occurred in Cali with Fania and in Colombia with vallenato and cumbia: the city put its stamp on it. The paisa reggaeton — as it is called in Antioquia — is not the reggaeton of Puerto Rico nor the adapted Puerto Rican reggaeton. It is something else: more globalized, more professional in its production, with more universal lyrics than those of its Caribbean predecessors, with a sound that — as a music analyst described with a phrase that stuck — "is like a café con leche: strong but smooth enough to play in any house in the United States."

That café con leche conquered the world.

The Context: Medellín After Escobar

To understand why reggaeton flourished in Medellín with such intensity, one must understand what Medellín was in the 2000s. The city had been during the eighties and early nineties the epicenter of the most violent drug trafficking in modern history: Pablo Escobar's cartel turned its communes into battlefields and its name into a global synonym for violence. After Escobar's death in 1993 and the dismantling of the cartel, the city embarked on one of the most accelerated and documented urban transformation processes in the world: the metro, the cable cars, the library parks in the poorest communes, the social urbanism policy that brought quality architecture to the neighborhoods that the conflict had forgotten.

This transformation was not only physical: it was also cultural. A generation of young people who had grown up under violence and had seen how the city decided it wanted to be something else found in music a space where this new identity could be built and projected. Paisa reggaeton — with its lyrics about love, partying, and Fridays with friends, without gunshots or moans, without the darkness that had marked the first phase of the genre in Puerto Rico — was the sound expression of this new Medellín that wanted to dance instead of cry.

As producer Shako, one of the pioneers of the genre in the city, said: "We managed to make the public realize that Colombian reggaeton could work." That phrase seems modest until one understands what it meant to say it in 2008, when Medellín was still struggling for the world to see it differently.

J Balvin: the first to break the world

José Álvaro Osorio BalvínJ Balvin — was born in Medellín on May 7, 1985. He grew up in a family that went from economic stability to difficulties when his father's business went bankrupt. At fourteen, he began making hip-hop rhymes and improvisations. He studied seven semesters of International Relations at EAFIT in Medellín before deciding that music was his thing. At seventeen, he traveled to the United States — first to Oklahoma, then to New York — to learn English and immerse himself in the North American urban music scene.

He returned to Medellín, started working in the city's party and club circuit, and for years built a local career that didn't quite take off. The first major hits came with "6AM" and "Ay Vamos" between 2012 and 2014. The global breakthrough was "Ginza" (2015): the song remained number one on the Billboard Hot Latin Songs for twenty-two consecutive weeks — a Guinness record — and reached the top 10 in most Latin American markets and the European market.

With "Mi Gente" (2017) — produced alongside Willy William and remixed by Beyoncé, which turned it into a global phenomenon of another magnitude — J Balvin became the first Latin artist to reach number one on Spotify Global 50. In 2018, he was the most listened to artist worldwide on that platform, surpassing any Anglo-Saxon artist.

Balvin has spoken with unusual frankness in the pop world about his crises of depression and anxiety — a gesture that in the context of reggaeton, where the image of toughness and success is almost mandatory, carried the weight of a political statement. His career is not just musical: it is also the story of a young man from Medellín who took a decade for the world to listen to him, and when it did, it didn't find what it expected to find, but something more interesting and more honest.

Maluma: the paisa who filled Madison Square Garden

Juan Luis Londoño AriasMaluma — was born in Medellín on January 28, 1994, nine years after J Balvin in the same city. As a child, he wanted to be a professional soccer player: he played in the youth divisions of Atlético Nacional de Medellín. An uncle gave him a recording session in a studio for his sixteenth birthday. The result — a song he recorded for fun — ended up changing the plan.

His debut album Magia (2012) came when he was eighteen years old. Pretty Boy, Dirty Boy (2015) was the album that launched him internationally with "Borró Cassette," "El Perdedor," and "Sin Contrato." In 2017, he recorded "Chantaje" with Shakira — a meeting of two generations of Colombian music in one song — which became one of the biggest hits of both careers.

In 2018, he became the youngest Colombian artist to fill Madison Square Garden in New York — fifteen thousand people — with his F.A.M.E. Tour. His single "Hawái" (2020) — remixed by The Weeknd — was the first to reach number one on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. chart: the first global number one by a Colombian artist in the history of that list. That year, he also collaborated with Madonna on "Medellín" — the song that brought the name of the city to the audience of the best-selling pop singer in history — and joined the virtual concert One World: Together at Home organized by Lady Gaga during the pandemic.

Karol G: The Bichota Who Conquered the World

Carolina Giraldo NavarroKarol G — was born in Medellín on February 14, 1991. She is the female artist who has most completely demonstrated that Colombian reggaeton is not a male phenomenon: her career built a position in the genre that was unprecedented for a Latin American woman, with artistic autonomy and a capacity for reinvention that her male contemporaries have not always shown.

Her album Mañana Será Bonito (2023) was the first Spanish-language album by a female artist to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 — the most important album chart in the North American market. Not the number one Latin: the number one of all genres, in all languages. That milestone was the most significant that any Colombian artist had achieved before, including Shakira.

Karol G's story in Medellín is part of the same genealogy as J Balvin and Maluma: they all grew up in the same city, they all know and respect each other, and they all contributed to building the scene that none of them could have built alone. Paisa reggaeton is as much a collective phenomenon as it is an individual one.

The Producers: The Names Behind the Sound

Behind every artist, there are producers who built the specific sound of Paisa reggaeton. Sky Rompiendo — Édgar Martínez, born in Medellín — is the Colombian producer with the most international recognition: his credits include work with J Balvin, Travis Scott, The Weeknd, and Pharrell Williams. Ovy on the Drums — Ovy Mendoza — was the sound architect of the early stages of Karol G. The Rudeboyz — the producer duo Kevin and Chan — built the hits of the Maluma-Karol G era. These names appear in the tags of songs that have amassed billions of global streams, but rarely in the headlines. They are the technical reason why Paisa reggaeton sounds different.

The New Generation: Feid, Blessd, and Ryan Castro

After J Balvin, Maluma, and Karol G, Medellín produced a third generation of artists that brought reggaeton back to its more local roots — the corners of the Antioquia neighborhood, El Poblado, Envigado — with a rawer and more specifically paisa aesthetic. Feid — Ferxxo — built a career with tens of millions of monthly listeners with a darker and more intimate sound. Blessd and Ryan Castro completed the picture of a generation that no longer needs to prove that Medellín's reggaeton can work: it only needs to decide what it wants to say with the platform their predecessors built.

Colombia as a Global Power: The Complete Map

What Colombia achieved in music between 1993 and 2025 is unprecedented in the musical history of any other Latin American country of comparable size. In thirty years, Colombia went from being known worldwide mainly for violence to being known primarily for its music. That is not a coincidence: it is the result of successive generations of artists who found in song the language with which they could tell the world that Colombia was also — and above all — that.

Shakira selling seventy million albums. J Balvin being the most listened to artist in the world on Spotify. Karol G debuting at number one on the Billboard

Spanish Billboard. Carlos Vives creating Colombia's first Latin Grammy. ChocQuibTown bringing the Colombian Pacific to the world. And beneath all of them, the cumbia of Totó la Momposina, the vallenato of Escalona, the bambuco of Villamil, the salsa of Joe Arroyo and Jairo Varela: Colombian music as the most complex and richest system that Latin America has produced in any comparable territory.

1. Juanes with twenty-three Latin Grammys. Aterciopelados in the top 10 of rock in

Editorial Note: In 2023, Mañana Será Bonito by Karol G became the first Spanish-language album by a female artist to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 — the most important chart in the North American music industry. That milestone crowned three decades of Colombian musical conquest that began when Shakira released Pies Descalzos in 1995 and Carlos Vives won Colombia's first Latin Grammy. The complete arc — from Barranquilla to Medellín, from vallenato to reggaeton, from the Caribbean coast to the communes of Antioquia — is the most extraordinary story of cultural export that Colombia has ever led in its history.

10 · 2 en DoReSol

Top 10 Essential Albums and Projects from Colombia in the 21st Century

#CanciónArtista

01

Energy

J Balvin

2016

Pendiente

02

Tomorrow Will Be Beautiful

Karol G

2023

Pendiente

03

Pretty Boy, Dirty Boy

Maluma

2015

Pendiente

04

Vibras

J Balvin · 2018

2018

Álbum

05

F.A.M.E.

Maluma

2018

Pendiente

06

Papi Juancho

Maluma

2020

Pendiente

07

Colores

J Balvin

2020

Pendiente

08

The Last Tour of the World

Bad Bunny feat. J Balvin (OASIS)

2019

Pendiente

09

FERXXOCALIPSIS

ATL Jacob · 2023

2023

Álbum

10

Life is One

Karol G

2021

Pendiente

Closing of the Colombia Series

With this chapter, the Musical Colombia Series by Doresol comes to a close: six articles, six genres, four centuries of musical history ranging from the African drums of the Caribbean coast to the reggaeton of Medellín's communes.

Colombia is, along with Cuba and Brazil, the Latin American country with the greatest musical diversity and depth per unit area. The cumbia, mother of rhythms, the vallenato that García Márquez called his novel, the bambuco that is the silent soul of the interior, the salsa from Cali that reinvented a genre until it made it its own, the rock that named violence to survive, and the reggaeton that turned trauma into a global party: six genres that are also six different ways of being Colombian, six different answers to the same question of how to live in a country of such beauty and complexity.

The next series: Mexico.