Seda

Seda — Bad Bunny and Bryant Myers on the Fall 2023 Charts

By the autumn of 2023, Bad Bunny had spent several years as the most-streamed artist on the planet, a position he had reached not by softening his reggaeton roots for a crossover audience but by pulling the audience toward him. Seda, his collaboration with Puerto Rican artist Bryant Myers, arrived as part of his project that year and touched the Billboard Hot 100 in late October. For anyone paying attention to where Latin music was going, the moment was almost unremarkable in its confidence: of course Bad Bunny was charting in the top 40. Where else would he be?

Bad Bunny in His Commercial Peak

The story of Bad Bunny's ascent from SoundCloud uploads in Bayamón to consecutive years as Spotify's most-streamed artist globally is one of the more remarkable trajectories in 21st-century popular music. Bad Bunny became the first non-English-language artist to rank as Spotify's most-streamed artist of the year when he achieved that distinction in 2020, and he maintained extraordinary commercial momentum through 2022 and into 2023. His approach throughout was remarkably self-consistent: he made the music he wanted to make, in Spanish, in genre frameworks he chose rather than conceded, and the world followed him there.

Bryant Myers as Collaborator

Bryant Myers came up through Puerto Rico's trap latino scene, developing a reputation for emotional directness in a tradition that drew from both reggaeton and the harder edges of American trap. His collaborations within the Latin trap and urbano spheres gave him credibility that a feature slot with Bad Bunny could amplify to a much larger audience. On Seda, their voices represent two sides of a tonal conversation: the urbano veteran and the artist carrying the next generation of Puerto Rican trap.

The Chart Moment

Seda debuted at number 38 on the Billboard Hot 100 on October 28, 2023, its highest position in a two-week chart run. The track moved to number 90 in its second week. This trajectory is characteristic of urbano tracks that chart heavily on streaming in the first week of an album release, then settle back as the broader listening population processes the project. Around 13 million YouTube views feed into the streaming totals that drive the chart methodology. The title, meaning "silk" in Spanish, sets a specific tonal register before a bar is played.

The Sound of Silk

In Spanish, "seda" carries connotations of luxury, smoothness, and sensory pleasure; calling something silk is a compliment that works on multiple registers simultaneously. The urbano and Latin trap traditions have a long investment in material and sensory imagery as a language for desire and status, and Seda participates in that tradition. The production aesthetic of Bad Bunny's 2023 work was characterized by a willingness to move between different genre temperatures, from dembow rhythms to slower, more atmospheric trap-influenced structures, and this track presumably operates somewhere within that range.

Puerto Rico and the Global Stage

What both artists on this track share is a specific cultural geography. Puerto Rico has punched far above its population weight in global popular music for decades, and the urbano explosion of the 2010s and 2020s represents perhaps the most significant expression of that outsize influence. Seda carries that context in its DNA, a product of an island's music finding an audience that spans every continent.

For the sound of Puerto Rico at its early-2020s commercial peak, press play and let the production do what it was designed to do.

“Seda” — Bad Bunny & Bryant Myers's singular moment on the 2020s charts.