Meet Karol G, Colombia’s Taylor Swift

We have all heard of Taylor Swift, but what about Colombian singer Karol G?

While Swift has dominated the headlines and concert ticket sales over recent years, it is actually the 33-year-old Latin American pop star whose videos have been the most watched online in recent years.

That’s according to Vevo, which is the main provider of official music videos to YouTube. Karol G’s were the most streamed around the world for three years in a row – 2021, 2022, and 2023.

Last year, Karol G’s Vevo videos were watched 4.7 billion times, with fellow Colombian Shakira in second place on 3.2 billion, and Swift on three million. It is expected to be a similar picture when Vevo releases its figures for 2024 this month.

So who is Karol G, and what has fuelled the success that also saw her sell out Madrid’s Bernabéu Stadium over four nights back in July, plus stadiums across the US last year?

Born in the Colombian city of Medellín in 1991 her full name is Carolina Giraldo Navarro. She wanted to be a singer from an early age, and when she was 14 she appeared on the Colombian version of the talent show X Factor in 2005.

Success did not immediately follow, and instead by 2014 she had moved to the US to live with her aunt in New York City to learn English and do menial work. She almost gave up pursuing a career in music at this time, but her father convinced her that she could make it.

While in the US Karol G also attended a music business conference in Boston, which she says was very helpful in helping her understand how the industry worked.

She got her breakthrough hit single in 2017, the song Ahora Me Llama, which was a collaboration with Puerto Rican male artist Bad Bunny. Her first album Unstoppable then followed.

Since then the hits have just kept on coming, and her 2023 album, Mañana Será Bonito, was the first entirely Spanish-language release by a female artist to top the US album chart.

Karol G has a number of endorsement deals

Karol G’s style of music is more often described as “reggaeton”. This combines hip-hop with Latin American and Jamaican music, with the singing and rapping usually done in Spanish.

While she is widely reported to be both hardworking and ambitious, Rocío Guerrero, head of Latin music at Amazon Music, says that the singer – and Latin music in general – have been greatly helped by the rise of streaming, both the music and the accompanying videos.

“Streaming democratised the landscape,” says Ms Guerrero, explaining that it has allowed Latin music, which wasn’t being played on mainstream radio stations to travel the world.

“Radio stations were local, but with streaming we brought together all of those audiences [around the globe]. It has given more opportunity to more Latin songs and artist to be exposed. Karol G is a perfect example of this evolution.”

Today on Amazon Music more than a third of Latin music is now consumed outside Latin America, and in the last three years alone the listenership for Karol G has grown by more than 250%.

Meanwhile, in the US, Latin music is now the fastest-growing genre, hitting a record $1.4bn (£1.1bn) in venues last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Streaming accounted for 98% of this.

And this year, Karol’s G’s Mañana Será Bonito album was the fourth most streamed globally on Spotify.