The group’s latest hit, “Siempre Te Voy a Querer” (“I Will Always Love You”) - which it performed on Conan’s recent “Conan Without Borders: Made in Mexico” episode - is one of its biggest yet, amassing more than 100 million YouTube views since December. On Spotify, the band boasts 2.2 million monthly listeners, and, this year, it is a finalist for three Billboard Latin Music Awards.

1 songs on the Regional Mexican Airplay chart since 2013 (more than any other musical act) and two No. “It’s universal.”īy marrying sly, romantic crooning with the countrified oompah of accordion and tuba, Calibre 50 has scored eight No. marketing and promotion for Fonovisa-Disa, the label that represents Calibre 50. “Regional Mexican is not regional anymore,” says Sergio Perez, vp U.S. With millennial acts reshaping the face of regional Mexican, a category encompassing everything from the mariachi-laced ballads of ranchera to the frenetic horns of banda, Calibre 50 is leading the charge, a resurgence largely out of sight of the American mainstream. While global crossover artists like Shakira and Pitbull tend to define perceptions of Latin music, the most popular Spanish-language genre in the United States is by far regional Mexican, a format steeped in nostalgia and bravado that accounts for 60 percent of the Latin radio stations monitored by Nielsen.

“They are the gasoline of Las Vegas,” Muñoz told me in Spanish before the show. Of the 3,000 people crowded around the stage (who each paid up to $60 to get in), nearly all were of Mexican descent, and almost as many seemed to be employed in the tourist industry, from maids and cooks to landscapers and construction workers.