Does Bad Bunny’s concert raise the Twin Cities’ stakes as a Latino music market?

He was only 23 at the time and had yet to crack the Billboard charts. Nonetheless, when Bad Bunny performed at El Nuevo Rodeo nightclub in Minneapolis in 2017, his local opening act put out a warning to everyone who would listen.

“You’re never going to have the chance to see him in a venue this size again,” St. Paul rapper María Isa remembers saying.

Turned out, Minnesota fans would not have a chance see the “Lo Siento BB” and “Dakiti” hitmaker in any local venue for six years.

After a State Theatre gig in 2018, Bad Bunny would skip the Twin Cities on all his subsequent tours as he skyrocketed from his first No. 1 U.S. hit (“I Like It”) to winning three Grammys and breaking a Spotify record for all-time most-streamed album (2022′s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” with nearly 16 billion streams). Some Twin Cities fans trekked to Chicago’s Soldier Field to see the Puerto Rican rapper in 2022, since that was the closest that year’s tour came to Minnesota.

At last, though, Bad Bunny is finally returning to Minneapolis to headline Target Center on Saturday as part of his aptly named Most Wanted Tour.

María Isa, for one, thinks the show is long overdue — as is the Twin Cities’ rising status as a sizable market for Latino music tours in the eyes of the concert industry, an idea this tour date supports.

“Minnesota is catching up,” said the rapper-turned-state-legislator, aka Rep. María Isa Pérez-Vega, from St. Paul’s West Side. “The numbers don’t lie.”

Bad Bunny’s concert is part of a string of appearances by major Latino music acts at Target Center. The Minneapolis basketball arena also will soon welcome two big Mexican stars two nights apart: pop singer Luis Miguel on May 26, followed by another breakout hip-hop star, Peso Pluma, on May 28.

The local arrival of Pluma — currently gracing the cover of Rolling Stone magazine — is arguably as overdue and nearly as anticipated as Bad Bunny’s return to town.

Groundwork for these tours was laid last year at Target Center. The arena took chances on 2023 tour stops by two other stars from Mexico, rapper Santa Fe Klan and singer/songwriter Carin León, as well as the first local arena appearance by Guatemalan singer Ricardo Arjona.

“We started to see an increase in conversation surrounding Target Center as an option for Latinx tours in early 2023, which resulted in [these] very successful shows,” said Amy Rahja, assistant general manager at Target Center, who promised at least one more big Latino music concert to be announced there this year.

“The attendance for these shows demonstrated that Latinx music has a huge fan base in Minneapolis, which will definitely help cement the market as a must play,” Rahja said.

That fan base obviously extends to St. Paul, too, where last month’s Trilogy Tour date with Enrique Iglesias, Pitbull and Ricky Martin at Xcel Energy Center saw its biggest attendance of any city up to that point three weeks into its 2024 run.

“That concert beautifully bridged cultures and showcased what Minnesota’s population looks like in 2024,” said María Isa, who attended the Trilogy show to hand Martin a Minnesota House proclamation thanking him for post-Hurricane Maria charity work in his native Puerto Rico. She said the Trilogy crowd featured “not just a strong mixture of Latinos who showed up, but a strong showing by Anglo fans of these Latino artists.”

About 345,000 residents of Minnesota identified as Latino in the 2020 U.S. Census, a number believed to be underreported. With nearly 200,000 of those residents living in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul now ranks at No. 42 among rankings of U.S. metropolitan areas — not exactly top tier.

However, that population skews young. About 37% of Latinos listed in the census were under the age of 18, compared with only 23% in the general population. One in 10 kids in Minnesota are now Latino, according to the census data.

That’s a lot of ticket-buying concertgoers coming of age, in other words.

One of the reasons the Twin Cities might have been overlooked by Bad Bunny and Peso Pluma’s handlers and other Latino music booking agents in recent years could be because of what radio DJ Terrell LaMarr called “a separation between the media, marketing and event spaces” with Spanish-speaking music fans.

“The English-speaking market has the resources and capabilities that the Latino, Spanish-speaking market doesn’t have, and it can promote a show like Bad Bunny and Peso Pluma coming to Target Center,” said LaMarr, co-host of the twice-weekly show “Radio Pocho” on community station KFAI (90.3 FM). “But they don’t quite know how to reach the people who don’t get their information from those mainstream resources.”

“Radio Pocho” co-host Miguel Vargas — one of the Twin Citians who traveled to Chicago to see Bad Bunny’s 2022 tour in lieu of a date here — echoed the idea that there has been too much disconnect between Latino music fans and the local concert industry.

“If a venue doesn’t feel like they can tap into that [Spanish-speaking] market, then they don’t want to take a risk on a show if they don’t feel they can promote it correctly,” LaMarr said.

Thus, artists like Bad Bunny and Peso Pluma maybe have a hard time finding Twin Cities venues between the sizes of El Nuevo Rodeo and Target Center as they graduate to bigger rooms in other U.S. cities.

Target Center’s booking rep admitted there has been a learning curve in promoting Bad Bunny and other Latino tours — and she welcomed it.

“We have an opportunity to dig deeper into this genre of music, explore the subgenres within and how to reach their respective fans,” Rahja said. “Discovering best practices in marketing Regional Mexican vs. reggaeton vs. Latin pop is important and something our team is really leaning into.”

Both Vargas and LaMarr said things are improving and “more of a middle ground” is being created locally for younger Latino artists to perform on their way up the venue ladder before getting to Target Center.

Some of the upcoming Twin Cities concerts that these champions of innovative Latino music pointed to in the coming months to check out include: Chilean hip-hop star Ana Tijoux at the Cedar Cultural Center on Friday; MexiCali rocker Reyna Tropical at First Avenue, May 17-18 (opening for Portugal. the Man); Los Angeles psychedelic tropicália band Chicano Batman with Colombian Canadian singer Lido Pimienta at the Uptown Theater on May 18, and jazzy Brazilian star Céu at the Dakota on May 22.

“I hope we get more artists to come here when they’re still small and working their way up,” LaMarr said, pointing back to Bad Bunny.

“We shouldn’t have to wait until you become the most-streamed artist in the world to get another show here.”

When: 8 p.m. Sat.

Where: Target Center, 600 1st Av. N., Mpls.

Tickets: $122-$625, axs.com.