It’s Day 2 of the Bogota Music Market (BOmm), the annual music market/conference put together by Bogota’s Chamber of Commerce and which this year (Sept. 13-16) brought together more than 2,000 attendees, including more than 1,000 artists and 85 international music buyers.
The sheer size and reach of the confab, the second-largest in Latin America behind Brazil, is remarkable for an event that’s only five years old and started with just 420 attendees, 14 national buyers and four international buyers. The success is a reflection – and a motor — of Colombia’s current standing as perhaps the hottest supplier of Latin talent on a global scale.
At any given time in the last few months, Colombian acts have occupied four to five positions in the top 20 of Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart, a phenomenal amount for a U.S. Latin market typically dominated by Puerto Rican and Mexican acts. That doesn’t even take into account the growing number of Colombian acts bubbling under the surface, like Bomba Estereo, ChocQuibTown and Monsieur Perine.