Just twice: That’s how many times Super Bowl halftime performers have sent a song to No. 1 the week after their televised extravaganza. Last February, Kendrick Lamar sent “Not Like Us,” his incendiary Drake diss record, back to the top spot after his playful, strutting halftime show. And this year, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—the 31-year-old known the world over as Bad Bunny—leaps to the top of the Hot 100 with “DTMF,” the de facto title track to his Grammy-winning 2025 album Debí Tirar Más Fotos and the final song he performed in his halftime show.
As a hit song, “DTMF” is historic for a number of reasons. It’s Bad Bunny’s first No. 1 on the all-genre Hot 100 as a lead artist. Prior to this, he’d topped Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart numerous times but only ever topped the Hot 100 once as a supporting artist, way back in 2018, on Cardi B’s “I Like It,” which featured Bunny as well as J Balvin. While Benito’s “I Like It” vocals were all in Spanish, Cardi’s single was primarily in English. “DTMF” ups the ante: It’s entirely in Spanish. The last time a mostly Spanish-language song was on top of the Hot 100 was 2017, when “Despacito”—the Luis Fonsi–Daddy Yankee jam that was remixed with a new vocal from English speaker Justin Bieber—was No. 1 for a then-record 16 weeks. The last time an all-Spanish song was No. 1 was three decades before that, in 1987, when Los Lobos’ remake of the Ritchie Valens ’50s classic “La Bamba” was on top for three weeks. In between “La Bamba” and “Despacito,” Los Del Rio’s “Macarena” was No. 1 in 1996 for 14 weeks, but like “Despacito,” it reached the top thanks to a remix, by the Bayside Boys, that added some hokey English to the front of the record. Bottom line, in the history of the Hot 100 and Latin-pop crossover, Bad Bunny’s “DTMF” is only the fourth Spanish-speaking No. 1 and only the second all-Spanish No. 1—and it didn’t need a Hollywood movie, a dance craze, or Justin Bieber to get there.
OK, it did need the Grammys and the big game—although “DTMF” was already a humongous hit even before Benito won all those statuettes or got the NFL’s invitation (more on that in a moment). The answer to why is this song No. 1 is not complicated—it’s the Super Bowl. The week after the Grammys and the day after the game, “DTMF” re-debuted on the Hot 100 at No. 10. It then shot to No. 1 a week later, after Americans had had time to digest the halftime show and pile onto streaming services to sample Bad Bunny’s wares.
But why this song specifically? Benito performed nearly a dozen songs in his halftime showcase, not counting quick samples of reggaetón classics like Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina,” and including Lady Gaga’s salsa remix of her anglophone smash “Die With a Smile” and Latin-pop legend Ricky Martin’s cover of Bunny’s own anti-colonialist anthem “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii.” The weirdest part: “DTMF” was the last song Benito performed, and he all but threw it away, singing it as he was leaving the field and yanking the audio monitors from his ears in triumph. Fans of the song—and I am one—got a distracted, somewhat unsatisfying version of “DTMF” in what was otherwise a very satisfying, moving, joyous halftime show.
Which suggests that there is another reason “DTMF” is No. 1: It’s a great song, maybe Bad Bunny’s best. (It has competition for that title.) American music fans, in their post–Super Bowl week of getting better acquainted with Benito’s music—some for the first time—got it right.
A blend of reggaetón, blippy old-school video game sounds, and plena, the heavily rhythmic, pandero-driven Puerto Rican folk music, “DTMF” is a profoundly nostalgic song, both in content and form. The entire Debí Tirar Más Fotos album, which literally means “I should have taken more pictures,” is a sampler of the traditional Boricua music Benito grew up with, blended with his own strain of melodic Latin trap. And its acronymized title track best embodies that sighing regret. “Enjoying nights like those that don’t come often,” he sings in Spanish in the first verse, “but wanting to go back to the last time I looked into your eyes—and tell you the things I didn’t get to tell you.” He reminisces about island pastimes from his youth—watching old men play dominoes, drinking rum, playing batá drums, and flashing jewelry and chains. It all builds to a rousing, singsongy chorus, its emphasis points like a chant: “Debí tirar más fotos de cuando te tuve / Debí darte más besos y abrazos las veces que pude,” which translates to “I should’ve taken more pictures of when I had you / I should’ve given you more kisses and hugs the times when I could.” Despite one slightly risqué, smartphone-era lyric at the outro, “Ojalá que … tú me envíes más nudes” (“I hope that you send me more nudes”), the song in the main is wholesome—literally family-friendly insofar as it yearns for hometown touchstones and mementos of loved ones. (Which frankly gives the lie to right-wing critics who want to investigate Bad Bunny’s halftime show for its purported lewdness.)
“DTMF” has been an exceptional song among Benito’s catalog from the moment it arrived last January. When the Debí Tirar album landed the day before Three Kings Day 2025, “DTMF” had no special designation—it wasn’t the first single (that honor went to the Latin house banger “El Clúb”) or even the song with the glossiest video (that went to the follow-up single, the salsa dance jam “Baile Inolvidable”). In fact, “DTMF” had no official video at all (it still doesn’t), and as the album’s penultimate track, it wasn’t going to benefit from typical streaming-consumption patterns. And yet, after Debí Tirar had been out a few days and fans had consumed all of its tracks, “DTMF” shot to No. 2 on the Hot 100 dated Jan. 25, 2025, making it the album’s highest-charting hit. (An ironic heartbreaker: “DTMF” could have been Bunny’s first lead-artist Hot 100 No. 1 a year ago, but it landed in the runner-up spot behind Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga’s “Die With a Smile,” the very song Gaga would perform on Bunny’s halftime show the following year.)
“DTMF” would ride the Hot 100 for 20 weeks, then drop off the chart last spring. But it never fully disappeared, cropping up later in the year on critics’ best-of-2025 lists as one of Bunny’s standout tracks. It was nominated for both Record and Song of the Year at the 2026 Grammy Awards, and though it didn’t win either prize, host Trevor Noah seemed to indicate that “DTMF” was the song the world was waiting for when he cajoled Benito into singing a few bars of it from the audience, in violation of the NFL’s contractual requirement that Bunny not perform anywhere before the Super Bowl.
And then, of course, the halftime show poured gasoline on the song and lit a match. You’d think the highest-rated television program of the year, every year, would generate a big hit song every time—especially given how many pop luminaries have played the NFL’s televised mega-mini-concert over the past couple of decades. In the digital era on the charts, fans can instantly react to musical events by downloading or streaming the artist they just saw. (Back in 1993, when Michael Jackson launched the modern era of the halftime show, he did experience a swelling in his album sales, but it took weeks.) To name just a few of these digital-era halftime performers: Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Beyoncé, Bruno Mars, Katy Perry, Coldplay, Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Maroon 5, the Weeknd, Rihanna, Usher. As massive as the audiences were for all of those megastars’ showcases, not a single one of them had the top song on Billboard’s Hot 100 the week after they took to the 50-yard line. Partially, it’s about timing—does the superstar have a current hit that could benefit from the Super Bowl bounce? Many of those performers (Prince, Springsteen, Madonna, Coldplay, Timberlake, Rihanna, Usher) were well past their prime as pop stars when they did halftime. But even for the overperforming millennials who managed to land the gig while still regular hitmakers—Mars, Perry, Gaga, the Weeknd—the stars did not align.
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The X factors for Kendrick Lamar last year and Bad Bunny this year are 1) the Grammys and 2) some juicy controversy. Both performers won major hardware at the Grammy Awards one week before the Super Bowl, giving each man a major boost in cultural momentum before they took the halftime stage. At last year’s Grammys, Lamar didn’t have an album in contention, but his “Not Like Us” swept all five prizes it was nominated for, including the seemingly improbable, flagship Record of the Year and Song of the Year prizes—only the second rap song to take both honors (after Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” in 2019) and arguably the first rap diss track to come anywhere close to that level of industry coronation. That Grammy success was matched this year by Bad Bunny taking three statues for Debí Tirar Más Fotos, including the prestigious Album of the Year prize, the first non-English album to do so. Given how visibly moved Benito was when his name was called in Los Angeles—notably, they played him onto the Grammys stage with “DTMF”—that viral moment alone was enough to push his song back onto the Hot 100, if not quite to No. 1.
That’s where the halftime show, and the controversy surrounding it, took over. Last year, the hot topic around Lamar’s performance was the will-he-or-won’t-he question over his performing “Not Like Us” while it was the subject of a Drake defamation lawsuit. As we now know, Lamar went there, and the song surged back to No. 1—but “Not Like Us” had already spent two weeks on top of the chart back in 2024. Benito had never spent time atop the Hot 100 with any of his solo hits. And the cultural stakes for his halftime show in 2026 were, if possible, even higher, given the threats of Immigration and Customs Enforcement targeting his fan base, the frothing over the NFL choosing the Spanish-first performer in the first place, and the resulting Turning Point USA counterprogramming of the halftime show. That the show not only went off without a hitch but was widely acclaimed and generated strong, if not quite record-breaking, viewership only fueled more consumption of Bad Bunny’s music.
How much? He’s got four songs in this week’s Top 10—including the aforementioned “Baile Inolvidable” at No. 2 and the New York–celebrating “Nuevayol” at No. 5, both new peaks—and 18 tracks across the entire Hot 100. On “DTMF” in particular, the growth in consumption was massive: an 85 percent increase in streams to 43 million, the largest streaming total of 2026 so far; a near-tripling of download sales to 12,000; and even a spike in radio spins, up 56 percent in airplay audience. Benito’s uptick was so substantial it checked the rise of Taylor Swift’s latest single, “Opalite,” whose heavily hyped new music video dropped two days before the Super Bowl but could manage only a small leap to No. 8 the following week amid the Bunny onslaught. (Swift is already plotting how she will get around Benito and shoot for No. 1 next week.)
Last year, in the wake of Lamar’s one-two Grammys–Super Bowl punch, his sleeper hit “Luther” turned into a monster hit, climbing to No. 1 a couple of weeks after the big game and staying there more than a dozen weeks. Does any Bad Bunny song have that kind of potential? I doubt it—for one thing, “Luther” had huge radio airplay supporting it, while “DTMF” has yet to even appear on Billboard’s all-genre Radio Songs chart, where songs in English still have an enormous advantage. The airwaves are how songs age into ambient aural wallpaper and enduring cross-cultural hits. But Benito has already pulled off so many improbable feats, taking Latin music to places never seen before, that I wouldn’t necessarily bet against him—if not now, then from the songs on his next album, whenever he decides to deploy it.
As for the backlash, when Bad Bunny was announced as the NFL’s choice for halftime last fall, the complaint in conservative quarters was that he didn’t represent the majority of Americans—hence the pointed title of the hastily concocted “all-American” halftime show to counterprogram Benito’s NFL showcase. As fatuous and bad-faith as this argument was, the complainers are right that, even now, a majority of Americans won’t encounter Bunny’s music day to day—it’s not on their radio stations, and 43 million streamers of his biggest hit doesn’t represent even one-fifth of the country. Here’s the thing: The song Benito replaced in the penthouse—Ella Langley’s superb country heartbreak song “Choosin’ Texas,” which was No. 1 on the Hot 100 only a week ago—was just as improbable a pop chart-topper as “DTMF” and is still not getting played on a majority of pop radio stations. Getting to No. 1 on the Hot 100 means assembling a plurality (not a majority) of music-consuming Americans for one week and, in so doing, inspiring the ones who don’t know your song to give it a try. Millions of nonfans of country music are now sampling Langley for the first time, at the same moment millions of nonfans of Latin music (non-Spanish-speakers, in fact!) are sampling Bad Bunny for the first time. Does either artist represent a majority of America? No way. The best of our polyglot culture? Absolutely. Like Benito says, let’s all get in the photo. “Métanse, to’l mundo.” There’s room for everybody.