How Much Did Bad Bunny’s Residency Actually Generate For Puerto Rico?
SOURCE:Rolling Stone|BY:Julyssa Lopez
Studies estimate that Bad Bunny brought in hundreds of millions — but the cultural value and impact on the island is even higher
At the peak of his popularity, Bad Bunny ditched the typical North American tour to center his homeland with a historic 31-show residency in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The sold-out residency, titled “No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí” (I Don’t Want to Leave Here), attracted more than half a million attendees. The shows were held at the José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum (known locally as “El Choli”), and took place Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights starting on July 11, 2025, with the first nine shows open only to residents of Puerto Rico. The following 21 shows encouraged non-residents to travel to Puerto Rico to experience Bad Bunny in his homeland. While several studies have measured the economic benefit of the residency to Puerto Rico, with a focus on the spending of individuals who traveled there for the concerts, the full cultural and economic impact of the residency on Bad Bunny’s homeland goes far beyond those dollar amounts.
Indira Luciano Montalvo, associate professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras, conducted a study on the economic, cultural, and social impact of the residency. The study, which she calls “very conservative” in its estimate, shows that the residency brought in a minimum of $176.6 million, mostly through documented wages and taxes. “The methodological approaches vary by study, which causes the estimates to vary,” Luciano Montalvo explains. “My study estimated the economic impact of the event itself: How much it generated in production, revenue, employment, and audience spending, not including the cost of tickets or expenses at the venue.”
The non-profit DMO Discover Puerto Rico estimates that the residency brought in about $200 million in tourist dollars spent on lodging, transportation, and food. A report from Gaither International estimates $733 million in gains from the residency, which also include the estimated value of the increased international exposure to and shifts in global perception of Puerto Rico.
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But the indirect economic benefit, which is difficult to fully measure, might be more significant. “There’s a direct impact of the residency that we can measure tangibly,” Javier Hernández Acosta, Dean of the School of Arts, Design and Creative Industries at Puerto Rico’s Universidad del Sagrado Corazón says. “But more important than that is being able to see all the impacts it has on different aspects of the economy.”
The Musical Effect
Some examples of these economic benefits included a 340 percent increase in the sale of vejigante masks in Ponce, local bookstores reporting a 280 percent increase in sales of Puerto Rican authors, or an average of 65 percent income increases for local salsa, bomba, and plena artists, as reported by the .
One of the primary beneficiaries of the exposure some of these studies have measured include other Puerto Rican musicians who Bad Bunny featured at the residency. The group Chuwi, for example, performed at all 31 shows and is now opening for the Latin American leg of Bad Bunny’s world tour. “I think there’s an invisible value that’s difficult to measure, given all the opportunities that [Bad Bunny] opened up simply by putting us in the spotlight,” says Wester Aldarondo of Chuwi.
Another one of the groups that performed every night of the residency was Los Pleneros de la Cresta. This group first met Bad Bunny on Nov. 3, 2024, at the Festival de la Esperanza, the closing event for political candidates in Puerto Rico advocating for independence where many major Puerto Rican musical artists performed.
“While we were backstage waiting for our turn, Bad Bunny arrived with his team. He greeted us and said he listened to our music, which obviously took us by surprise. He saw our astonished faces and said, ‘And I’m going to tell you a secret that I hope will stay here. And that is that you’re going to be on our next album.’ Our faces became even more surprised,” group member Jeyluix Ocasio Rivera recalls. “Then he took out his phone and showed us in his notes the tracklist of the album, and, indeed, it said ‘CAFé CON RON’ featuring Los Pleneros de la Cresta. And after about two or three days, I think, the call came for us to come to the studio, and the rest is history.” In January of 2025, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS dropped and everything changed for the plena group, which was founded in 2013 at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras with the goal of teaching plena to their peers and keeping the Afro-Puerto Rican tradition alive.
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After their collaborations with Bad Bunny, Los Pleneros de la Cresta went from tens of thousands of monthly listeners on Spotify to 12 million. This translates directly to a shift in their economic reality, which, in turn, impacts the cultur al and political projects the group is dedicated to in Puerto Rico. Coinciding with the start of the residency, Los Pleneros and their non-profit Acción Valerosa launched Ruta Café Con Ron, a cultural experience in which participants purchase tickets to join an educational twist on a chinchorreo, or a bar hop typically on a Puerto Rican-style party bus.
The chinchorreo went from the urban area of Bayamón to the mountain town of Ciales and included stops for coffee tastings, viewing local art, and more. It generated $45,000 in proceeds, 100 percent of which the group is putting toward the restoration of Ciales’s historic cultural center Yerba Bruja. “These investments begin with us being able to direct them to our organization, strengthening our ability to continue impacting the lives of Puerto Ricans through our community leaders, by hiring them and also providing them with services and investing the money where it is directly channeled to the heart of the Puerto Rican people. It’s a chain,” says Joseph Ocasio Rivera of Los Pleneros de la Cresta.
Similar to Los Pleneros de la Cresta, Chuwi had only thousands of followers prior to the release of their collaboration with Bad Bunny on DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, “WELTiTA.” After the album was released, they quickly shot up to 14 million monthly Spotify listeners. In September, they performed their first NPR Tiny Desk concert.
“[Bad Bunny] didn’t have to do any of this, you know? I don’t think any artist in history has put so much effort into helping other artists from the island climb the ladder. So the fact that he’s doing it, that he’s investing so much energy, so many of his resources into this, it’s like a clear message that says, ‘No, Puerto Rico, we’re all going to rise together,’” Wester Aldarondo of Chuwi says.
In addition to Chuwi and Los Pleneros de la Cresta, Bad Bunny’s residency featured more than a dozen Puerto Rican musicians known as “Los Sobrinos,” a crew of dozens of Puerto Rican dancers, as well as individual artists like Puerto Rican cuatro player José Eduardo Santana and the voice of Sapo Concho, Kenneth Canales, all of whom are now part of Bad Bunny’s world tour.
Chuwi also cites some unexpected ways that the residency benefitted Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican culture. For example, local Puerto Rican clothing designer Herman Nadal received exposure from styling Chuwi that led to an increase in sales and new celebrity clients. The group’s lead vocalist Lóren Aldarondo explained, “He created three looks for us to wear one weekend of the residency” and, as a result, “other guests performing the residency sought out his clothes.” More recently, Nadal dressed Rauw Alejandro.
Chuwi also explained how the lives of some service workers changed as a result of the residency. A taxi driver with whom they share a mutual friend “was able to finish paying for his house, simply because of the amount of traffic from people who needed Uber and taxis during the months of the residency,” Wester says. Pérez of Discover Puerto Rico highlighted that even “local artisans, small food vendors, neighborhood cafés, and independent shuttle operators outside traditional tourist zones experienced significant increases in business.”
Pérez of Discover Puerto Rico, explained that the residency fundamentally changed the Puerto Rican economy. Beyond turning the typically slow hurricane season, which lasts June through November with August and September as the peak months, into a period of increased tourism, Perez says that since the residency ended “tour operators report sustained interest in Puerto Rico’s cultural experiences, demonstrating that the residency elevated our positioning from a beach-only destination to a cultural capital.” This helps demonstrate why initiatives like Ruta Café con Ron, and the investment Bad Bunny made in Puerto Rico when he joined forces with Los Pleneros de la Cresta, contribute to a Puerto Rico with tourism initiatives grounded in Puerto Ricans’ desire for self-determination. As economist Indira Luciano Montalvo explains, this post-residency moment creates an important opportunity for Puerto Rico to “think about the type of tourism we want and where we want the benefits to go.”
Hernández Acosta of the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón notes that these kinds of examples “underscore that there is so much about the economic benefits of the residency that we cannot yet quantify, from how many people will return to Puerto Rico again after coming to the residency, to the returns that will come in the future from Puerto Rican artists who performed at the residency and have benefitted from the exposure the residency offered them.” The Bad Bunny effect is real, Hernández Acosta says. “Anything connected to this phenomenon of Benito increases in value.” And this increased value is part of the “chain” that Los Pleneros de la Cresta described. This is why Hernández Acosta calls DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS and the residency a “beautiful example” of an artist acting as “a driving force for economic development. Because now Chuwi’s royalties, Los Pleneros de la Cresta’s royalties, and Rainao’s royalties will skyrocket. If we think about the ecosystem and not just the individual, others can flourish.”
“De Puerto Rico Pa’l Mundo”
Now Bad Bunny, along with his massive “corillo” (or crew) of Puerto Rican musicians and dancers, is on his tour and already bringing economic benefits to other places in Latin America.
Since the residency ended, the first stop for Bad Bunny’s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS world tour was the Dominican Republic. The three-night stint in Santo Domingo reportedly brought in approximately 15,000 foreign tourists, and $14 million in revenues.
On Dec. 21, Bad Bunny finished an eight-concert stint at Mexico City’s Estadio GNP Seguros. While final data on the economic impact of these sold-out stadium shows is still in progress, according to the National Chamber of Commerce, Services and Tourism of Mexico City, the concerts were expected to generate $177 million, from ticket sales, hotels, food, local transportation, retail, and more. More than half a million people attended the concerts with up to 45 percent of those attendees coming from abroad.
One of those tourists was Nicole Gonzalez Patterson, 43, a Puerto Rican attorney who has spent her entire life going back and forth between the U.S. mainland and Puerto Rico. She has seen Bad Bunny live in Puerto Rico multiple times, including at the residency this summer. She made her way to Mexico City to see Bad Bunny’s concert because she “couldn’t miss another opportunity to sing and dance and scream, ‘Yo soy de P FKN R.’ It’s a matter of pride and joy.”
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But Gonzalez Patterson also immediately noticed the cultural and economic impacts of Bad Bunny in Mexico. “At the airport, people were buzzing about the Bad Bunny concert. Restaurants were playing Bad Bunny. Stores had Puerto Rican themed souvenirs like a sapo concho keychain and a Puerto Rican flag on a hat,” she says. Even the international souvenirs demonstrate the value of the residency outlined in the Gathier International report — Puerto Rico’s cultural value is at an all-time high.
Bad Bunny’s residency created a multi-faceted economic revolution for his home nation of Puerto Rico. As his epic year of record breaking and innovation comes to a close, now he is bringing some of those same benefits across the globe as part of his world tour.