Fifteen songs reached No. 1 in Panama in 2025, according to the Monitor Latino airplay chart compiled week by week from Radio Tracking Data. Exactly one of them was Panamanian.
That song was “Paris,” by Boza and Sech. It held the top spot for a single week, dated 29 September.
The other fourteen belonged to Shakira, Bad Bunny, Karol G, Morat, Emilia, Nicki Nicole, Tini, Marc Anthony, Daddy Yankee, Romeo Santos and Prince Royce. Colombian, Puerto Rican, Argentine, Venezuelan, Dominican. Not Panamanian.
The country that exported the genre and imports the chart
This is the same country where the genre was invented. Reggae en espanol came out of Panama City in the early 1980s, from the descendants of West Indian canal workers who translated Jamaican dancehall into Spanish and sold cassettes on the diablos rojos buses. USC Dornsife traces the line directly: Renato, El General, Nando Boom, then San Juan.
Remezcla’s Tu Pum Pum feature has Renato, one of the originators, explaining why the money went north. Radio would not play the records, he says, because “this is black music,” while Puerto Rican acts got the investment. His summary: “Nadie invirtio en nosotros.”
Four decades later the commercial infrastructure still sits somewhere else. Sech’s fourth album, “Tranki, Todo Pasa,” was his first release after signing to Rimas Entertainment, the Puerto Rico company behind Bad Bunny, as Rolling Stone reported in October 2024. Boza became the first Panamanian artist signed to Sony Music Latin in 2019, per Remezcla.
The regional pool is growing 17% a year
The macro picture is genuinely good. Latin America was the fastest-growing recorded music region in the world in 2025, up 17.1% for a sixteenth consecutive year of growth, with streaming accounting for 88.1% of regional revenue, according to the IFPI Global Music Report 2026 and Music Business Worldwide‘s breakdown.
Panama is not one of the markets IFPI breaks out. Its listeners are counted inside that regional pool, which means a Panamanian catalogue only converts the growth if the delivery, splits and payee data are clean enough to route the money home.
Two royalty pipes, and only one is Panamanian
CMO means collective management organization, the body that licenses public performance of songs and pays writers.
Panama’s is SPAC, the Sociedad Panamena de Autores y Compositores, constituted on 24 September 1972 and state-authorized under Title IX of Law 64 of 2012. SPAC’s own rules, published on its site, allow the board to deduct up to 30% of gross collections to cover the cost of collecting and distributing.
That pipe handles bars, radio, venues and events. It does not handle the recording.
Master streaming royalties from Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and Deezer arrive through distribution, not through SPAC. For most working Panamanian artists, that second pipe is where the majority of the income sits, and it is the one nobody registers them for.
What a Panama City or Colon indie should actually do
- Register the writer side with SPAC, then stop assuming it covers streaming. It does not.
- Document recording splits at delivery, not after the first payout dispute. DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the metadata standard DSPs read, and split data that is not in the delivery is not in the report.
- Read the airplay chart and the streaming chart as two different businesses. Monitor Latino Panama measures radio. Your Spotify audience map probably looks nothing like it.
- Build the release plan around Colombia, Puerto Rico, Spain and the United States, because that is where the Panamanian sound has always converted.
- Take the local moment when it comes. Boza was named Panama’s official musical ambassador for the 2026 World Cup on 1 June, in partnership with FEPAFUT, per Billboard.
Panama does not have a talent problem. It has a routing problem, and routing is a distribution question. Splits and payee data that survive the trip are the difference between one week at No. 1 at home and a catalogue that earns from Medellin, San Juan and Madrid every month.
Related reading: Puerto Rico Has 3.2 Million People and Owns a Third of Latin America’s Charts and The Dominican Republic Built a Single Window for Music Rights.
