BIG SHOWS WITH MEXICAN ACTS GROW IN MILWAUKEE
Mexican Fiesta officials wanted to kick off their 50th anniversary celebration with something big. What they got was huge. Shortly after the Milwaukee festival wrapped its 2022 edition, Mexican Fiesta Executive Director Teresa Mercado and her team met with Charlie Goldstone and Scott Leslie, co-presidents of FPC Live, the Madison-based, Live Nation-backed promoter, to discuss a major American Family Insurance Amphitheater concert to kick off the 2023 festival. “We had a real opportunity … to take the event to another level,” Goldstone said. “We came up with what I thought was a very ambitious dream list of artists to play, and we began going after some of these artists.”
“The one artist we got was not on the list because no one thought it was possible.”
That artist was Los Bukis. The band, often considered Mexico’s answer to the Rolling Stones, reunited in 2021 after a 25-year hiatus. That year, they played just nine football stadium shows, but that was enough for the band to have the sixth-highest grossing tour of 2021 according to concert trade publication Pollstar, better than blockbuster road warriors like Guns N’ Roses, Dave Matthews Band, Chris Stapleton and the Jonas Brothers, all of whom played two to four times as many concerts that year.
Now, after selling out SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, Soldier Field in Chicago and enormous venues in their homeland, Los Bukis’ next concert — just one of two in 2023 — will be in Milwaukee on Aug. 24, the night before Mexican Fiesta returns to Maier Festival Park Aug. 2527.
“(Los Bukis frontman) Marco Antonio Solís was one of the artists we were working on, and he was working on his own (arena and amphitheater) tour,” Goldstone said. “We got a call (from his team) saying, ‘Hey, instead of just Marco, how about Los Bukis?’ And of course we wanted that.”
When tickets for Bukis went on sale in February, Goldstone said FPC Live was “able to deliver a ticket gross for a regional Mexican show in Milwaukee larger than anybody has ever done.”
And that success paved the way for FPC Live to score another incredible get:
Peso Pluma, whose imaginative blend of hip-hop and regional Mexican music has made him one of the biggest breakouts of 2023, will play Fiserv Forum Sept. 14.
Combine those two shows with a rare, cutting-edge Latin artist Summerfest booking with Mexican rapper and singer Santa Fe Klan earlier this summer, and Milwaukee is getting a caliber of Mexican music stars rarely seen in the market.
“It’s just one more chapter in the story that we are telling about Milwaukee. This is a market that can support shows of all genres at a high level, and that is something that not everybody has always believed,” Goldstone said. “Milwaukee
has a huge Mexican population, and to be able to offer these artists for the community in this way is very special for us.”
Mexican audience is growing in Milwaukee
John Bustos is president of Bustos Media, the Portland, Oregon-based owner of WDDW-FM (104.7), the Mexican regional station better known as La Gran D. He estimates that more than 80% of Latinos in Milwaukee are Mexican. And the Hispanic population has grown more in the Milwaukee area than any other ethnic group, with 35,300 more Latinos in the city according to the 2020 Census, a 24% increase from the prior census. (That may also be an undercount; Mayor Cavalier Johnson and other Milwaukee officials formally challenged the Census tally last December. )
With that growing demographic, the Hispanic media landscape in Milwaukee has expanded, too. Following the establishment of regional Mexican-dominated radio station La Gran D in 2005, Bustos Media added a second station in Milwaukee, WDDW-HD2 (93.7 FM), in 2016 that brought other styles like reggaeton into the mix. Due to demand, the company is adding two more HD stations to the Milwaukee market this year: one devoted entirely to reggaeton, the other to traditional ranchera music.
Those Spanish-language music
stations have been crucial in promoting Latin concerts in Milwaukee, which started to increase in 2015 as booking agents for Latin acts began expanding into secondary markets as touring dramatically grew around the country.
The Rave went from hosting about eight Latin shows a year after opening in 1991, to booking 14 so far for 2023. The Pabst Theater Group hosted its first Spanish-language concert in 2016. Two years later, the Milwaukee Bucks booked the first major Latin arena tour stop in 18 years in the city, with Colombian reggaeton star J. Balvin, for one of the first concerts at Fiserv Forum.
That show was a box-office bomb, despite efforts like $20 student tickets, $25 general-admission tickets and a pre-show USA vs. Colombia soccer match screening in the arena and Deer District. But the Bucks didn’t let another 18 years go by without another Spanishlanguage arena tour stop in the city, booking Banda MS for a Fiserv Forum show in 2019, and now Peso Pluma.
“One of the things that we’ve been focused on is how we continue to diversify our programming,” said Aurora Rodriguez, director of booking for Fiserv Forum. “The last few years, Latin music has been on the rise. … We’re definitely trying to stay proactive.”
With reggaeton leading the national Latin music explosion, some of the genre’s biggest stars — including Rauw Alejandro and Bad Bunny — have played sold-out shows for about 3,500 people at the Rave’s Eagles Ballroom. But none has brought their arena tours to town after Balvin.
“Reggaeton events here are more of a challenge,” Bustos suggested. “We don’t have the numbers of a big city like Chicago that has more diversification.”
Regional Mexican acts sell quickly
Instead, Bustos said, the Latin concerts that dominate Milwaukee feature regional Mexican acts.
Demand is high enough that some shows at the Rave are announced with less notice than many other concerts at the venue, and a higher ticket price, and still reliably bring out crowds. For example, tickets for a Sept. 3 show for banda group La Adictiva, announced in late July, range from $63 to $153. It will be the band’s second Milwaukee show in as many years.
“Regional Mexican … is a more sure bet that you will do well at the box office,” Bustos said. “(Mexicans) are still the most dominant (Latin) population segment even though there may be a fair amount of presence of non-Mexican regional cultures. I think they will dominate for a fair amount of years to come. Milwaukee still has a strong influence of migration from the Chicago area.”
And regional Mexican fans “are very brand-loyal, very loyal to that music,” Bustos stressed. “They’re used to being out and attending these events as part of their social fiber and culture.”
Latin music in ‘some interesting territory’
And in 2023, Latin music, Bustos suggested, is heading into “some interesting territory.”
Regional Mexican music is swiftly becoming the most popular genre in the Latin space. Streaming this year is up 49% so far from the year prior, according to music data tracking company Luminate, a higher jump than any other type of music aside from K-Pop — thanks to a new wave of artists, like Peso Pluma, evolving the sound.
That bodes well for Milwaukee’s concert landscape and its loyal regional Mexican audience.
“It caught the whole industry by surprise,” Bustos said. “They’ve taken what they’ve seen in the hip-hop world … and found a way to fill in that counterculture coolness factor. with a base of regional
Mexican music.”
“Peso Pluma is part of a new frontier,” Bustos continued. “They have horns and tubas and some of the traditional things you hear in a banda. … But add rap from a cool, young, hip dude in a baseball cap wearing thousand-dollar Jordans. The fusing is a phenomenal thing.”
The shift from what reggaeton offered a young wave of Latin music fans — from drum machines to live instruments at its core, and from often vulgar songs to more romantic ones — is catching like wildfire, to the point that Bad Bunny collaborated with regional Mexican band Grupo Frontera on the hit track “Un x100to” in May.
“Ella Baila Sola,” a collaboration between Pluma and Eslabon Armado (the latter played a Milwaukee show last month at the Rave’s Eagles Ballroom), is the first regional Mexican song to crack the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No. 4. And “Génesis,” Pluma’s June album featuring “Ella Baila Sola,” is the highest charting regional Mexican album of all time, debuting at No. 3 on the Billboard 200.
“Peso Pluma is on fire right now,” Rodriguez said. “The popularity is nothing we’ve ever seen.”
And in terms of major Mexican acts like Pluma and Los Bukis booking Milwaukee shows, Rodriguez predicts it’s “definitely just the start.”