company and offers additional marketing
and promotion resources to elevate their
careers — just ask 2019 breakout star
Eilish, who took part in the program’s
inaugural year.
Yet even as he takes his career to the
next level, Balvin insists on doing it his
way. Though fluent in English, he sings
predominantly in Spanish and posts often
on social media about spreading Latino
pride and culture. He is open about his
struggles with anxiety and depression at
a time when the topic remains somewhat
taboo in Latino communities. And with
Colores — a concept album in which each
song is named after a different color and
will receive an extravagant, fashion-
forward video to match — he’s aiming to
prove that he’s not just a go-to collabora-
tor on hit singles, but an auteur in his
own right.
“One of my great dreams is to be a bil-
lionaire,” he tells me in Spanish. “Not be-
cause of the money — it’s not like you can
fly two private jets at the same time if you
have a billion dollars instead of 100 mil-
lion. It’s about making a statement: Yes,
we can. Carlos Slim is a billionaire in
Mexico. Great. But we’re talking billion-
aires in the entertainment world — like
JAY-Z, who has been an inspiration for
me. Why isn’t there a Latino there?”OR A GUY WHO MAKES
lofty pronouncements about
achieving billionaire status,
Balvin is surprisingly low-
key in person. When we
meet again a week after the
Super Bowl at a beachside Miami studio
complex, he’s dressed simply in a T-shirt
and jeans, his pink hair buzzed short. He
doesn’t drink, doesn’t like to party and
rarely goes out — you’re more likely to
find him logging hours at the gym than
the club. Balvin lived for a while in New
York, where he relished being able to
run out and get coffee in near anonymity.
Even though he’s now living back in Me-
dellín, he prefers to travel without secu-
rity. (He does, however, have an assistant
and his personal photographer with him
today.) He often appears in photos with
his hands folded in front of him, prayer-
style, like he’s just happy to be there, and
he eagerly shares goofy-looking throw-
back photos of himself — reading comic
books as a tween, with an old girlfriend
— as if to dispel any mystique. “I don’t
really feel famous,” he says. “I’m always
surrounded by my friends, my people. To
them I’m not Balvin, I’m José.”Early on, his career was a family affair.
As a college student in Medellín — he
studied communications and interna-
tional business at Universidad EAFIT —
Balvin played two or three shows a week
at local high schools to build his fan base,
while his father, Álvaro Osorio, a former
economist and marketer, quit his job to
manage Balvin full time. (Today, Osorio
runs his own artist management firm,
Gofar Entertainment.)
Balvin’s hustle eventually caught the
attention of EMI Latin, which signed him
in 2011 and was acquired by Universal
Music Latino the following year. Still,
Balvin didn’t break through outside of
Colombia until he released the Farruko
team-up “6 AM,” off Balvin’s 2013 album,
La Familia. The pulsing track, with a
party-all-night video Balvin describes as
a “Latin The Hangover,” mixed Farruko’s
grit with Balvin’s smoother, more melodic
stylings — and became an instant radio
smash, hitting No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot
Latin Songs chart. By then, Balvin was
managed by León, who was simultane-
ously leading AEG’s Latin division and
using her connections to land Balvin op-
portunities, including an opening slot on
Enrique Iglesias and Pitbull’s joint tour in- León also brought Acosta, a young
Colombian executive with a background
in management and promotion, into the
fold.
Balvin, however, was a savvy strategist
in his own right. Five years ago, when he
was feeling frustrated by what he saw as
a lack of support from Universal Mu-
sic Latino, he reached out to the label’s
chairman and CEO, Jesús López. “He
phoned me and said, ‘I want to see you
because I don’t feel comfortable with the
way things are going,’ ” recalls López.
The CEO was in Mexico but offered to
meet the next day when he was back in
Miami. Instead, Balvin flew that same
night to Mexico with Acosta and met
López in his hotel at midnight. “We spoke
about the problems he saw and what I
saw,” says López. “He said, ‘I want to be a
legend. I want to leave a mark.’ And that’s
when it started.”
To this day, Balvin prefers the direct
approach. When he launched his 2016
album, Energía, with the single “Ginza,”
he went to Universal armed with num-
bers about the song’s traction in Mexico,
which historically has not been a reg-
gaetón-friendly market, and convinced
the label to push the song there. He has
also been proactive in securing deals in
the fashion world, where he has served as
the first Latino male face of Guess, among
other partnerships. It was Balvin who
approached Nike about collaborating, not
the other way around. “Of course they
weren’t going to call us,” says Balvin with
a laugh. “Because they didn’t understand.
Now they do. I called, I explained, I
showed them numbers and facts.”
“I always say 50% of José’s success is
José,” says Acosta. “He’s involved in every
detail, and he will personally call the head
of the label or the Spotify programmer.”
In 2015, Balvin was in Los Angeles
attending the Special Olympics when he
passed Braun and his star client Justin
Bieber in a hallway. “He approached us
just to say he was a big fan of Justin’s
music and a big fan of my work as a man-
ager,” recalls Braun. “I didn’t know who
he was, but there was something about
his personality and charisma that made
me want to stay in touch. We exchanged
numbers and became friends, with
no agenda or expectations of working
together.” When Bieber decided to do a
Latin remix of his song “Sorry” later that
year, Braun called Balvin.
It planted a seed. After Balvin and
León parted ways last summer (the two
remain close and, by all accounts, speak
often), Balvin wanted to find someone
who could further grow his career on a
global level. “I wasn’t trying to get more
management clients, but the opportunity
to work with him, the respect I have, the
friendship I have for him — we just de-MANAGEMENTSB PROJECTS
Scooter Braun
VIBRAS LAB
Fabio AcostaLABEL
UNIVERSAL MUSIC LATINO
Jesús López, chairman/CEO,
Universal Music Latin America and
Iberian Peninsula
Angel Kaminsky, executive vp,
Universal Music Latin America
and Iberian PeninsulaAGENT
WME
Richard Lom, agent
Rob Markus, partner44 BILLBOARD • FEBRUARY 29, 2020