How Bad Bunny’s Massive 2025 Changed the Game — And Made Him The Next Super Bowl Headliner

Bad Bunny’s titanic 2025 started over two years ago, when he penned a single phrase for the song that would become “Baile Inolvidable” while far away from his native Puerto Rico: perhaps in Los Angeles, perhaps New York.

It began with a synth riff one of his producers had sent him, “and the lyrics came to me — ‘I thought I’d grow old with you’ — and I knew I wanted to do a salsa with it,” he says today. “You write that first line and you start working on the album. ‘Baile Inolvidable’ was one of the first songs.”

Bunny let the idea marinate, went on tour and filmed two movies. By the time he turned his full attention to “Baile Inolvidable” around August 2024, the song was fully formed in his head — he just needed someone to bring it to life. He found that someone in Big Jay (real name: Jay Anthony Núñez), a then-22-year-old producer-percussionist who’d never worked on a major production and made salsa versions of trap songs for fun. One of those, uploaded to Instagram, caught Bad Bunny’s ear. After months of back and forth with Bad Bunny’s team, the two finally met in Puerto Rico.

“He had the entire idea: the winds, the voices, the horns. He was very clear,” Big Jay remembers. “We sat side by side for a straight hour, no breaks, and we did the song top to bottom on my computer. He said: ‘Today, Aug. 28, I did a global hit with Big Jay.’ ”

The making of “Baile Inolvidable” provides a glimpse into the making of the chart-topping album that houses it, DeBí TiRAR MáS FOToS, which started with Puerto Rico as its backbone and ultimately fused genres from traditional plena to elaborate salsa to contemporary reggaetón.

It was yet another departure for the creatively restless Bad Bunny, but a relatively familiar one. “This one was normal because it’s the music we hear every day on the island,” manager Noah Assad says. “We knew in PR it would be an important cultural moment. I never thought it would be equally special to the world.”

DeBí TiRAR MáS FOToS spent four nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and is already one of the 10 longest-running No. 1s of all time on the Top Latin Albums chart. (Bad Bunny has four albums on that list, including YHLQMDLG, the longest-running No. 1 ever on the chart at 70 weeks.) As of late September, the album’s title track and breakout hit, “DtMF,” had spent 31 weeks at No. 1 on Hot Latin Songs — not only a personal record for the artist but also the longest run of the decade and the third-longest of all time (only behind Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” and Enrique Iglesias’ “Bailando”).

But long before the album’s release in early January, Bad Bunny and his team had decided to make DeBí TiRAR MáS FOToS a tool for Puerto Rico’s benefit. “Everything that we do, we put our island first,” Assad says. “We want an island with no corruption. We want an island with better education. We want the island to be a great place in the long run. The purpose was always there. We just didn’t know how to use it.”

Musically, the process began and ended in Puerto Rico. Roughly 95% of the album features live instrumentation — and on an island teeming with musicians, Bad Bunny had hundreds of veterans to pick from. Instead, the album showcases young and lesser-known groups like Los Pleneros de la Cresta, a quartet of young men who perform traditional Puerto Rican plena; the indie quartet Chuwi; and Los Sobrinos, the band formed for the album that comprises mostly young players.

For production, Bunny tapped new talent like Big Jay but also kept longtime collaborators like MAG, a Nuyorican who was eager to dive into Puerto Rican genres and beyond. In fact, MAG had started work on another DeBí TiRAR MáS FOToS Hot Latin Songs chart-topper, “NUEVAYoL,” which samples El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico’s “Un Verano en Nueva York,” a full two years before work began on the project.

“[Bad Bunny] made it the first song [on the album] because it’s about Puerto Ricans who had to leave the island and ended up in New York,” MAG says.

But even before the first note was recorded, Assad and the artist had long spoken about one day staging a Puerto Rican residency. In July 2023, Assad and Alejandro Pabón, partner in Puerto Rican promoter Move Concerts and head of operations for Rimas Nation, Rimas’ touring division, had a secret lunch with Jorge Pérez, then-regional GM of Legends Global, whose properties include Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot, the only venue on the island that could adequately host a residency of this scale. “I didn’t know the album concept, but we had to block the dates in a strategic fashion so no one knew it was him,” says Pérez, who is now CEO of Discover Puerto Rico.

“We had a code word for it: the Super Bowl,” Pabón says. By August 2024, Assad gave word to “revive the Super Bowl,” mindful that Bad Bunny’s still-unfinished album was going to be very Puerto Rican. They asked Pérez to set aside three full months, during the summer, because it wouldn’t be possible to load in and out between shows.

But rather than a run-of-the-mill residency, the team wanted it to be a Puerto Rican experience. They worked with Vibee, the Live Nation-founded company for destination experiences, to create VIP packages for tourists. Then in January, just two weeks before the tour announcement, “Benito said the first [nine] dates were only for Puerto Ricans, nonnegotiable,” Pabón says.

Reasonable pricing — capped at $35 for the cheapest ticket and $250 for the most expensive — was also nonnegotiable. “We didn’t lose money, but obviously, we could have made much more. But that’s not what this was about,” Pabón says. “This was a gift to Puerto Rico.”

Bad Bunny and his team aimed for every aspect of the show to be done locally, from vendors to the gigantic mountain that would occupy the Coliseo’s floor. The residency’s visual centerpiece was constructed over three months in a secret hangar and took 10 days to rebuild in the arena — a task further complicated by the fact that Bad Bunny didn’t want any sound systems to be visible on the mountain. “We had to mount the entire sound system in the ceiling, which has never been done by anyone in any tour,” production supervisor Rolando “Rolly” Garbalosa says.

All told, 460,000 total tickets were sold across the 30 dates, according to Pabón, with more than a quarter-million purchasers coming to the island expressly for the shows. Some are calculating the economic impact of the residency at $500 million, Pérez says.

The final flourish was No Me Quiero Ir de Aqúi: Una Más, an encore 31st show open only to Puerto Rican residents that became the most watched single-artist performance on Amazon Music when the platform livestreamed it on Sept. 20. Moreover, it served as the launch pad for a broad partnership between Amazon and the artist in Puerto Rico that includes economic development, agricultural initiatives and STEM educational programs, all centered on local growth.

“I want to be clear that I’m Puerto Rican and that’s why I do the music I do,” Bad Bunny says. “This album is dedicated to Puerto Rico, and I speak of things that are possibly only relevant there. And yes, it was big in Puerto Rico, but not just there. That’s what surprised me most.”

Bad Bunny further cemented his global icon status when he was announced in late September as the halftime show headliner at the upcoming Super Bowl LX — and, naturally, he did so with a nod to the island that means so much to him.

“The excitement I feel, more than for myself, is for all those who ran countless yards so I could score a touchdown… for my people, my culture and our history,” he said in a statement. “Go and tell your abuela that we will be the Super Bowl halftime show.”

This story appears in the Oct. 4, 2025, issue of Billboard.