Bad Bunny won Album of the Year, and America still certifies Spanish on a smaller scale

There are two plaques for "Despacito" in the United States, and they tell you two different stories about the same song.

The remix with Justin Bieber's English verse is certified 13 times Platinum: 13 million units, a Diamond record by any reading. The original, the one Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee released in January 2017 with every line in Spanish, sits at 141 times Platino. That sounds ten times bigger. It is smaller. In the Recording Industry Association of America's Latin program, one Platino is 60,000 units, so 141 of them come to 8.46 million.

Our argument is simple. The RIAA should retire its separate Latin scale and certify every record in America on one set of numbers, whatever language it is sung in. The Latin program was built for a market the industry treated as a niche. In the year a Spanish-language album won Album of the Year, it has become a translation problem that makes Latin music look either inflated or minor, and never just big.

Two scales, one country

Here is how the system works, from the RIAA's own certification criteria. The main program, the one every pop fan knows, gives Gold at 500,000 units, Platinum at a million, multi-Platinum from two million and Diamond at ten million. A unit blends sales and streams: 150 on-demand streams count as one single, and 1,500 streams of an album's songs count as one album.

Los Premios de Oro y Platino, the Latin awards, cover albums and singles with more than half their lyrics in Spanish. The streams convert the same way. The thresholds do not. Oro is 30,000 units, Platino is 60,000, multi-Platino starts at 120,000 and climbs in steps of 60,000, and Diamante is 600,000. Every rung of the Latin ladder sits at 6% of the main one.

The program dates to 2000, when Spanish-language records in the US lived largely in specialist shops and on Spanish-language radio, and the first Oro asked for 100,000 copies. The levels were higher then: 100,000 for Oro and 200,000 for Platino before 2008, then 50,000 and 100,000. In December 2013 the RIAA cut them again, to the 30,000 and 60,000 that stand today.

Read that sequence once more. Over the very years that Latin music was growing into the US mainstream, the bar for a Latin plaque kept coming down.

The numbers have stopped meaning anything

The cost is not abstract. It shows up every time a Latin hit is certified and has to be explained.

Take "Te Boté (Remix)", the 2018 reggaeton posse cut that put Nio García, Casper Mágico and Darell next to Bad Bunny, Nicky Jam and Ozuna. Its Latin certification stood at 106 times Platino in 2025, which works out to 6.36 million units. On the main scale that is six times Platinum: a huge record, and an easy figure to grasp. On the Latin scale it becomes a number so large it reads as a typo. When Darell sold songs from his catalogue to Anthem Entertainment in November 2024, the buyer's announcement called it "the 10x Diamond global smash". Ten Latin Diamantes is six million units. Ten main-program Diamonds would be 100 million. The phrase is technically defensible and impossible to read correctly.

The confusion runs the other way too. A song that is genuinely modest gets to call itself Platinum at 60,000 units, which is about nine million streams. A fan scanning a plaque wall cannot tell a regional hit from a national one without doing division.

And the split is about language, not about how many people listened. "Despacito" shows it best. In 2018 the original and the Bieber remix, counted together, were certified Diamond on the main scale, and the RIAA said it was the first Latin-language single to get there. So the main scale can count a Spanish song perfectly well. What decides which ruler a record is measured with is the share of its lyrics in Spanish. An English verse moves a song from one ladder to the other.

The market the scale was built for is gone

The RIAA's own data makes the case against its own program. Its 2025 report on Latin music in the US put the genre's wholesale revenue at $1.009 billion, the first time it has crossed a billion, up 4.2% while the whole US market grew 3.1%. It was the tenth straight year Latin music set a new high. Latin music is now 8.8% of all recorded music revenue in the United States, and 98.2% of that money comes from streaming.

That last figure matters most. The Latin program was designed for a separate retail world: separate shelves, separate distributors, a separate chart economy. Streaming dissolved it. A Bad Bunny stream on Spotify or Apple Music in Texas counts exactly the same as a Taylor Swift stream in Ohio. The platforms do not run a Spanish-language tier. Only the plaque does.

Meanwhile, the cultural argument is over. On 1 February 2026, Bad Bunny's DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS became the first Spanish-language album to win Album of the Year at the Grammys. A week later he headlined the Super Bowl halftime show. This month, the Billboard Latin Music Awards crowned him Artist of the Year again and the Latin Grammys head to Las Vegas on 12 November. None of that is a niche.

The fair case for keeping it

The strongest defence of the Latin program is not about superstars. Bad Bunny does not need a Platino. The case is for the long tail: the norteño band that fills ballrooms in Houston and Chicago, the bachata singer with a loyal audience in New York, the Christian worship act singing in Spanish. On the main scale, most of them will never reach 500,000 units. The Latin awards give them a plaque for the office wall, a line for the press release and a milestone for the label to celebrate. Over the program's life, hundreds of titles have been certified Oro and Platino that would otherwise have gone unrecognised.

That is a real benefit, and anyone arguing for one scale has to answer it. But notice what the defence actually says: small acts deserve recognition at smaller numbers. That is true. It is also true of a folk singer in Vermont, a jazz trio in New Orleans and an emo band in Philadelphia, none of whom get a discount for singing in English. The problem the Latin program solves is not a Spanish problem. It is a small-audience problem, and the RIAA has chosen to solve it for one language only.

The fix already exists elsewhere. Britain's BPI certifies albums at Silver from 60,000 units, Gold from 100,000 and Platinum from 300,000, on one scale for every language. A genre-blind lower tier in the US, something like a Silver at 100,000 or 250,000 units, would keep a plaque within reach of the norteño band and the folk singer alike. Keep the Spanish wording on the award if labels want it. Keep a Latin mark on the plaque so the program's history stays visible. Just measure everyone with the same ruler.

What one scale would say

Picture the database after the change. "Despacito" would read eight times Platinum, alongside its remix at 13, and a reader would see at once that the English verse added real reach, which is true and worth knowing. "Te Boté" would read six times Platinum, a number any pop fan can place without a calculator. Bad Bunny's catalogue would line up next to Drake's and Swift's in numbers anyone can compare.

That comparison is exactly what the current system prevents. A separate ladder says, quietly, that these records compete in their own league. For two decades that was arguably a kindness. Now it is a ceiling that the music has already gone through. As Latin music grew, the RIAA lowered its bar twice. The respectful thing now is to drop the second bar altogether, and let a Spanish-language record be what the streams say it is: as big as anything else in the country.