Mexican pop music

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Mexican pop is popular music produced in Mexico.

Mexico is the country that exports the most entertainment in Spanish language. Latin pop music was limited to a Latin America until the mid-1990s, when an interest towards this type of music increased after Ricky Martin's, Paulina Rubio and Jennifer Lopez' debuts before the mainstream US audience.

1 Mexican pop music through the years
- 1.1 1960s
- 1.2 1970s
- 1.3 1980s
- 1.4 1990s
- 1.5 2000s
2 List of Mexican pop singers and groups

[edit] Mexican pop music through the years

[edit] 1960s

During the 1960s and 70s most of the pop music produced in Mexico consisted on Spanish-language versions of English-language rock-and-roll hits. Singers and musical groups like Angélica María, Johnny Laboriel, Alberto Vázquez, Mayté Gaos, Enrique Guzmán, Julissa, Teen Tops and Los Rebeldes del Ritmo performed cover versions of songs by Elvis Presley, Paul Anka, Nancy Sinatra and others.

[edit] 1970s

During the 1970s Angélica María started to record ballad songs with music by mariachis and a new style of music was born, namely the ranchera ballad. Other artists followed suit such as Juan Gabriel. José José focused on boleros while other artists such as Estela Nuñez fusioned boleros with ranchera music to produce the bolero ranchero.

[edit] 1980s

During the 1980s songwriters like Guillermo Méndez Guiú, Rafael Pérez Botija or Aureo Baqueiro wrote songs for singers like Yuri, Lucía Méndez and musical groups like Timbiriche, Flans and Fandango headed the radio charts in Mexico and started launched international career by promoting their music in Latin America. Other huge pop music icons in Mexico during the 1980s include Ana Gabriel, Chayanne, Luis Miguel, Roberto Carlos, Franco de Vita, Magneto, Juan Luis Guerra, Emanuel, Cristian Castro and Ricardo Montaner, although not all of these singers hail from Mexico.

[edit] 1990s

It was in the late 1990s, after Ricky Martin's success in Europe with the hit María and the international launch of 1998 World Cup's theme song, The Cup of Life, that an interest for Latin American music started to arise and Mexican pop music started to look attractive for intercontinental markets.

Televisa, Mexican largest television network had exported Spanish-language media to many countries, and this allowed Mexican actors to take advantage of their popularity to launch music careers in countries where Televisa telenovelas were popular. Some examples of these actors are Thalía, Lucía Méndez, Guillermo Capetillo and Verónica Castro. Thalía toured Asia and recorded songs in Tagalog for her fans in the Philippines. Thalía also recorded an album produced by Emilio Estefan titled En Éxtasis in 1995. This album contained songs that were mixed with Latin American traditional music and was the one which renewed the success that Gloria Estefan had begun a decade before and this was the first record in the 1990s which mixed latin rhythms with pop and would reopened the market in Latin America, as well as the idea that this kind of music was indeed profitable. On the albums released later by Thalía, she mixed pop music with ranchera, banda and norteña music. Other singers such as Paulina Rubio and Aracely Arámbula have also produced songs that combine traditional Mexican music with popular music.

Other Mexican pop singers who have had a considerable success in Mexico and the rest of North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia are Luis Miguel, Fey, Lucero, Anahí, Belinda and Gloria Trevi.

[edit] 2000s

TV Azteca, Mexico's second-largest television network, with her company Azteca Music has also been successful in launching singers. To help with this cause TV Azteca developed a reality show called La Academia which has produced singers such as Yahir and Víctor García. Televisa attempted to compete with TV Azteca with its own reality show called Operación Triunfo which has produced sigers such as Darina, but the ratings of TV Azteca were always higher and Televisa did not produced another season of the show. However, Televisa has produced for years telenovelas that are targeted to teenagers, some of them have launched music careers of their actors. Among these are Muchachitas, Mágica Juventud, Alcanzar una Estrella, Clase 406 and more recently Rebelde.