00:00The crowd's going wild for 26-year-old Chinese rap sensation Sky is Your God, and it may surprise
00:12you to hear that this is in Macau and San Francisco. His vial tracks in Mandarin, Cantonese,
00:18and Hakka have found fans all around the world, including those who don't speak a word of Chinese.
00:24Hyper-local music is traveling the furthest these days. Now, for years, the blueprint to find global
00:30success was to draw heavily on Western pop traditions and to add English lyrics. That's
00:35the strategy K-pop used with megastars like BTS and BLACKPINK, but that's no longer the only way.
00:42So take Puerto Rican star Bad Bunny, who's headlining the Super Bowl this year. He's Spotify's most
00:48streamed artist for the fourth time in 2025, and although he is fluent in English, he only
00:53performs in Spanish. He also staged an extended residency in San Juan rather than tour internationally,
01:00which brought an estimated $181 million into the local economy. There's a new generation of
01:06borderless listeners who don't care about boundaries of language or location, and others think that being
01:13hyper-specific helps musicians stand out from a bland algorithm. For the global music industry,
01:19the implication is clear. Audiences are rewarding those who sound most authentically like themselves.
01:25That's why my playlist, a mix of Chinese rap, Caribbean pop, and Gaelic hip-hop, needs no translation.
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