Bad Bunny Didn’t Perform. He Deployed: The Hidden Economics of Cultural Disruption

Everyone’s talking about how many people watched Bad Bunny’s halftime performance.

Wrong question.

The real question is: what was the value of those views?

Because this wasn’t just a performance. It was a high-leverage cultural move with layers most people missed entirely.

First 24 hours:

∙ Tens of millions watched live

∙ Tens of millions more through clips, replays, reactions, international coverage

∙ A second wave from debate, commentary, remixes

But views don’t matter unless they convert. And this one did.

Performances like this typically spike streaming 200–400% the following week.

That’s real revenue across platforms, catalog lift, playlist priority, global discovery. Not just one song — the whole catalog.

Then there’s touring. Moments like this don’t create demand, they accelerate it. They justify premium pricing, expanded routing, faster sell-through, bigger brand deals.

This is why artists take these stages even when they’re not getting paid upfront.

The stage is the marketing engine.

Now look at the strategy — and this is where it gets interesting.

This wasn’t generic representation. It was precision storytelling built on specific, lived Puerto Rican experience. Every detail was a signal.

Toñita ran the social club in Williamsburg.

Fighting gentrification for years.

Not an actress. A real person who runs a real community space where Puerto Ricans gather, organize, celebrate, grieve, plan. Social clubs aren’t aesthetic — they’re infrastructure. They’re how diaspora communities maintain continuity when displacement tries to erase them.

Having her there wasn’t symbolic. It was acknowledgment that Puerto Rican culture in the continental US doesn’t just exist in abstraction — it exists in rented spaces in gentrifying neighborhoods where the rent keeps going up and the community keeps showing up anyway.

The fruit vendor. The taco vendor.

Again — real vendors. They exist.

This matters because it’s economic participation, not representation theater. These are people building livelihoods in the informal and formal economy. Street vending isn’t quaint. In many Latino communities, it’s survival, entrepreneurship, and cultural preservation rolled into one.

And here’s the political nuance people missed: including a taco vendor in a Puerto Rican performance wasn’t an accident or confusion. It was deliberate coalition-building. A recognition that Latino identity in the US is not monolithic — it’s Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Salvadoran, Colombian, and more — and that solidarity across these communities is both strategic and necessary.

It says: we see each other. We work alongside each other. We survive together.

The wedding.

A real Puerto Rican wedding. Not a styled version. A real couple, real family, real ceremony.

Weddings are how culture gets transmitted. They’re where language, music, food, ritual, and memory converge. They’re where the older generation passes something forward and the younger generation decides what to keep.

Putting a wedding on that stage — at the Super Bowl, in front of a hundred million people — was a statement: our joy is not background. Our traditions are not flavor. Our families are not props.

It was also deeply political in a way that didn’t need to be explained to anyone who knows.

Because Puerto Rican weddings happen in the context of:

∙ An island still recovering from Hurricane Maria

∙ A debt crisis manufactured by colonial financial structures

∙ A power grid that still fails regularly

∙ A migration pattern driven by economic necessity, not choice

So when you see a wedding on that stage, you’re seeing resilience. You’re seeing people who celebrate anyway. Who build families anyway. Who create beauty and continuity in the face of systemic abandonment.

The power grid references.

This is where it all connected.

The performance included visual and lyrical references to Puerto Rico’s power grid — the one that collapsed after Maria, the one that’s been failing ever since, the one that represents decades of neglect, corruption, and colonial extraction.

It wasn’t metaphor. It was material reality.

And it was placed in a performance watched by tens of millions of Americans who have no idea that Puerto Ricans are US citizens. Who don’t know about PROMESA. Who don’t know that the island’s infrastructure crisis is a direct result of policy decisions made in Washington.

Bad Bunny didn’t lecture. He didn’t explain. He just showed it.

And in doing so, he made the political deeply personal — and the personal undeniably political.

Here’s why this matters strategically.

Most brands think “cultural moment” means:

∙ Hire diverse faces

∙ Use Spanish in the copy

∙ Drop it during Heritage Month

That’s not culture. That’s performance.

What Bad Bunny did was deploy culture as infrastructure:

∙ Real people with real stakes

∙ Specific references that mean something to the community first

∙ Coalition-building that doesn’t flatten difference

∙ Political context embedded in cultural expression

∙ Joy and resilience as strategy, not aesthetics

The result?

Some people loved it. Some people hated it. Some people didn’t get it at all.

That’s not a bug. That’s the signal.

Because when culture shows up honestly:

∙ It disrupts

∙ Disruption drives conversation

∙ Conversation extends reach beyond the initial audience

∙ Reach converts to revenue, attention, and long-term brand power

And here’s the part most marketers miss:

You don’t need everyone to get it.

You need the right people to feel seen.

Because when a community feels seen — actually seen, not pandered to — they don’t just watch. They share. They defend. They expand the conversation. They become infrastructure.

That wedding wasn’t just on stage for 90 seconds.

It’s in Instagram stories. It’s in group chats. It’s in living rooms where abuela is explaining to the kids why she cried. It’s in think pieces. It’s in TikToks breaking down every reference.

It’s everywhere.

And all of that compounds.

Streaming revenue. Tour demand. Brand equity. Cultural capital that lasts years, not weeks.

This wasn’t entertainment.

This was a masterclass in how culture, when deployed with precision and integrity, moves markets — whether everyone likes it or not.

Most brands will never do this because they’re afraid of alienating someone.

But the brands and artists that win?

They understand that trying to be for everyone means you’re for no one.

They know that specificity is strategy.

And they know that culture isn’t a campaign.

It’s infrastructure.