Before the Labels Came Calling

Duetti has partnered with eight artists and producers of Cuban heritage, and when we took a closer look at their catalogs, the numbers surprised us: nearly a billion streams across roughly 300 songs.

What these artists have in common is reparto, the high-energy mix of traditional Cuban rhythms and urban beats born in Havana’s working-class neighborhoods. For years, the music industry treated it like a local curiosity: music for Cuban fans, from an island without premium streaming, sung in slang few outside Cuba could follow.

Reparto artists kept making music anyway. Today, nearly half of our partners’ streams come from outside the US, and in October, reparto got its first dedicated panel at Billboard Latin Music Week in Miami.

01What Is Reparto?

Reparto means neighborhood: the block or building where you’re from. “It’s music of the people, of the places they come from,” says Kevin Eiroa, Duetti’s head of Latin A&R, whose family is Cuban. Its rhythms are cousins to timba, built for car stereos and clubs.

For years, songs traveled through El Paquete Semanal, a weekly USB drive of movies and music copied hand to hand across the island. Today, YouTube does most of the work because it’s free and doesn’t require a credit card, while social media and the diaspora carry the sound from Havana to Miami and Madrid.

Its pioneers paved the way. El Taiger, one of reparto’s most important breakout artists, was killed in 2024, but hits like “La Historia” and “El Punto” helped bring the sound to a global audience. More recently, “Dichávate” by Ya Ice Dilan, Rey Tony, Helabusador, JipMusic Global and DJ Honda took off with soccer players and spread across TikTok and Instagram. By 2026, Billboard was naming reparto artists among its Latin artists to watch.

02What Reparto’s Streaming Data Reveals

So far in 2026, more than half of all streams for six of our partners from Cuba came from the US (52.3%), followed by Spain (13.2%), Peru (5.7%) and Mexico (3.1%). All six share the same top four markets, and together with Italy, these five countries make up roughly three-quarters of their listening.

Peru is the one to watch. In 2026, it has become a bigger share of every one of these partners’ audiences compared with the same period last year. Kevin calls Peru one of the “trampoline” countries that launched reggaeton, and its love of salsa and dancing gave reparto an easy landing. Artists now book festivals there, and Peruvian musicians are making their own versions of the genre.

Reparto’s potential rests on more than one viral hit. Dany Ome and Kevincito El 13 have released collaborations with Ozuna and Wisin, and Wow Popy’s album MUNDIAL features reggaeton heavyweights including Farruko, Tito El Bambino and Ñengo Flow. The money is better than it looks, too: much of the diaspora lives in markets that pay well, and an artist with 100,000 monthly listeners can earn as much as many mainstream acts.

And none of this counts Cuba itself, where listeners often watch YouTube through VPNs routed through other countries, so almost none of it can be tracked. “If they did have access,” Kevin says, “the Cuban numbers would be insane.”

Our Music Finance Index, developed with Billboard, points to growing interest in Latin music catalogs, and reparto shows why. “I don’t think anyone’s really talked about the business side of Cuban music,” Kevin says. “It’s not just an underrated genre. It’s an underrated business opportunity.”

03Backing the Artists Behind the Numbers

Duetti’s approach goes beyond acquiring music rights. We provide capital, marketing support and catalog management to help artists grow the audiences they’ve already built, and we moved into reparto early because the data was there.

Take L Kimii. On the Radar, the platform that has hosted Drake, asked for him by name, and he became the first reparto artist from Cuba ever featured.

We’ve also supported Dany Ome with YouTube, TikTok and playlist campaigns. His single “Extrañarte Más” debuted at No. 11 on YouTube Music in the US and No. 13 in Spain, passed a million views in its first three days and is now approaching 10 million views on YouTube. On TikTok, the sound has been used in more than 36,000 videos.

04Reparto and the Latin GRAMMYs

Eight Cuban artists are nominated at this year’s Latin GRAMMYs, in categories from tropical music to jazz and classical composition. None represents reparto yet, but Kevin expects that to change. When he started in the business in 2012, Latin artists were still trying to cross over into the US. “Now it’s the opposite,” he says. He expects reparto to be a much bigger genre within two years. For now, in his words, it’s “a drop in the ocean of what it could potentially be.”

At the Billboard panel, artists put it more simply: reparto sounds like joy, and people want a good time.

The industry may have overlooked reparto. The audience didn’t.