Latin music (Portuguese and Spanish: música latina) is a term used by the music industry as a catch-all genre for various styles of music from Latin America, Spain, Portugal, and the United States inspired by older Latin American, Spanish and Portuguese music genres, as well as music sung in the Spanish or Portuguese language.

Because the majority of Latino immigrants living in New York City in the 1950s were of Puerto Rican or Cuban descent, “Latin music” had been stereotyped as music simply originating from the Spanish Caribbean. The popularization of bossa nova and Herb Alpert’s Mexican-influenced sounds in the 1960s did little to change the perceived image of Latin music. Since then, the music industry classifies all music sung in Spanish or Portuguese as Latin music, including musics from Spain and Portugal.[4]

Following protests from Latinos in New York, a category for Latin music was created by National Recording Academy (NARAS) for the Grammy Awards titled Best Latin Recording in 1975.[9] Enrique Fernandez wrote on Billboard that the single category for Latin music meant that all Latin music genres had to compete with each other despite the distinct sounds of the genre. He also noted that the accolade was mostly given to performers of tropical music. Eight years later, the organization debuted three new categories for Latin music: Best Latin Pop Performance, Best Mexican/Mexican-American Performance, and Best Tropical Latin Performance.[10] Latin pop is a catch-all for any pop music sung in Spanish, while Mexican/Mexican-American (also to referred to as Regional Mexican) is based any musical style originating from Mexico or influences by its immigrants in the United States including Tejano, and tropical music focuses any music from the Spanish Caribbean.[11]

In 1997, NARAS established the Latin Recording Academy (LARAS) in an effort to expand its operations in both Latin America and Spain.[12] In September 2000, LARAS launched the Latin Grammy Awards, a separate award ceremony from the Grammy Awards, which organizers stated that the Latin music universe was too large to fit on the latter awards. Michael Greene, former head of NARAS, said that the process of creating the Latin Grammy Awards was complicated due to the diverse Latin musical styles, noting that the only thing they had in common was language. As a result, the Latin Grammy Awards are presented to records performed in Spanish or Portuguese,[13] while the organization focuses on music from Latin America, Spain, and Portugal.[14]

Since the late 1990s, the United States has had a substantially rising population of “Latinos”,[15] a term popularized since the 1960s due to the wrong and confusing use of the term “Spanish” and the more proper but less popular term “Hispanic”.[16] The music industry in the United States started to refer to any kind of music featuring Spanish vocals as “Latin music”.[17][18][19] Under this definition, Spanish sung in any genre is categorized as “Latin”.[20] In turn, this has also led to artists from Spain being labelled as “Latin” as they sing in the same language.[21]

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Billboard magazine use this definition of Latin music to track sales of Spanish-language records in the United States.[22][23] Billboard however considers an artist to be “Latin” if they perform in Spanish or Portuguese.[24] The RIAA initiated the “Los Premios de Oro y Platino” (“The Gold and Platinum Awards” in Spanish) in 2000 to certify sales of Latin music albums and singles under a different threshold than its standard certifications.[25] Billboard divides its Latin music charts into three subcategories: Latin pop, Regional Mexican, and tropical.[26] A fourth subcategory was eventually added in the mid 2000s to address the rise of Latin urban music genres such as Latin hip hop and reggaeton.[27]