How Live Nation’s Hans Schafer Redefined Latin Touring’s Global Potential: ‘It’s Not One-Size-Fits-All’

In 2021, Hans Schafer took what may have been his biggest roll of the dice in a career full of them.

That summer, as the live sector restarted following the pandemic, the legendary grupero band Los Bukis decided to reunite after 30 years. At the time, Schafer explains, Los Bukis “was not an Instagram phenomenon. There was no viral moment. There was no real, current streaming story that fully explained what was there.”

But Schafer and his team understood the band’s intangible “cultural ­currency” — and how it could “open the gate for something that seemed unrealistic, that hadn’t been done before.” Under Schafer’s guidance, Live Nation put Los Bukis in the Los Angeles-area SoFi Stadium for two nights that August. The shows grossed $13.8 million, according to Billboard Boxscore, a figure that “exceeded what we thought we could do,” he says. Those shows forever altered touring for the biggest Latin artists. “The scale became bigger than what people expected and helped redefine the stadium ceiling for Spanish-language touring in the U.S.”

Previously, stadium touring had been nearly unheard of for even the most popular Latin acts. “We marked a turning point in the concept of stadium shows, a phenomenon unseen [in Latin touring] until the Los Bukis reunion tour, Una Historia Cantada,” Los Bukis’ Marco Antonio Solis says. “I know [he’s] there even when [he stays] out of the spotlight, and that’s what matters,” Solis says of Schafer. “We see the tree, but never the root that nourishes it.”

And Schafer and his team didn’t stop with Los Bukis, soon plotting stadium tours for ascendant new artists including Bad Bunny, Karol G and Fuerza Regida, as well as veterans such as Shakira.

Schafer will sit down for a panel with Rawayana during Billboard Latin Music Week. For schedule and registration, go to billboardlatinmusicweek.com.

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In one form or another, Schafer has been making these bets — successfully — for the last 20 years. Since joining Live Nation in late 2017 as a senior vp of global touring, the promoter, 44, has played an integral part in reimagining the touring map for Latin artists, putting them on bigger stages than ever before, and in places far beyond the long-standing traditional markets and territories. He’s grown what began as a largely U.S.-focused role into one of ­global influence, and today, he “[thinks] across markets and [connects] teams around the world,” harnessing Live Nation’s vast resources and network of promoters to help Latin artists scale their businesses and meet high demand worldwide.

The results have been undeniable: In 2015, the pre-pandemic year where Latin tours comprised the largest share of the total grosses on Billboard Boxscore’s year-end top 100 tours chart, that figure was 6.8%; after dipping to 5.3% in 2019, the figure has easily surpassed its pre-pandemic marks in every full touring year this decade, with a high-water mark of 15.8% in 2024. The lion’s share of this surge has been fueled by Live Nation-promoted artists at the stadium, ­arena and amphitheater levels — including Bad Bunny, Junior H, Peso Pluma and Shakira, all of whom have appeared multiple times on Boxscore’s monthly Top Tours chart over the last year.

But the most critical dimension of Schafer’s professional philosophy — and one that dates back to his earliest days in the business — is that, maybe, these artists haven’t needed him at all. He’s just helping to tell a story that’s already out in the world.

Born in Miami to Venezuelan parents, Schafer spent his youth immersed in the city’s cultural melting pot. He’d listen to then-current American artists like Dr. Dre and Sublime but was also deeply in touch with music from the Latin diaspora: the Argentine reggae-rock band Los Pericos, Venezuelan ska group Desorden Público, Mexican pop artist José José, Dominican bachata singer Juan Luis Guerra, Spanish flamenco legend Paco de Lucía. He still remembers the first time he heard de Lucía and the jazz fusion guitarist Al Di Meola’s “Mediterranean Sundance/Rio Ancho” collaboration on cassette. “I figured out pretty early that if music was good, I was going to be into it, regardless of the category it belonged to,” he says. “It was never really one lane — and I think that openness always stayed with me.”

And for an omnivorous music listener, Schafer grew up in the right household. His stepfather, Jesús López, was one of the most influential Latin music executives of the late 20th century and remains equally so today as chairman/CEO of Universal Music Latin America and Iberian Peninsula; Schafer’s mother was a label manager at BMG Latin. “From a very early age, I was always exposed to music and the music business and seeing it from different angles,” he says. “At some point, that passion that you have for music, you want to translate into something that will stay with you forever — so it just became sort of a natural thing for me to say I wanted to pursue a career in music.”

Schafer played guitar (“I guess I technically still play guitar,” he says with a laugh) and performed in bands, but after graduating from college, he gravitated to the business side, interning at Universal Music before landing in 2005 at mun2, a network under NBCUniversal with the mission of targeting young Latino audiences. Following a recent change in ownership, the channel was taking a novel approach.

“It was the first time that you had a major network — whether it’s television, radio — that was playing music both in English and in Spanish,” Schafer recalls. “You were seeing Daddy Yankee followed by Beyoncé and then going into [Los] Tigres del Norte.”

Schafer and his colleagues “were out trying to explain what this new world was — and it wasn’t even really a new world,” he says. “It was really that somebody took a bet to try to tell the story that was already happening.”

After five years at mun2, Schafer returned to Universal Music in 2011 for a job in brand partnerships. As the music business navigated the shift from flip phones and iPods to smartphones and streaming, “the label world was really trying to figure out what the new world order was,” Schafer says. “Brands were definitely a big, new part of the business that was growing, and ultimately that led to the bridge for me to move over into live.”

Schafer had previously met powerhouse Latin music executive Rebeca León, but it was in her capacity as the head of AEG’s Latin business that he really took notice — and even said to himself, “I would love to be a part of that team.” León also managed the Universal signee Juanes, for whom Schafer closed a Mastercard partnership. The deal had a live component and provided Schafer the “opportunity to really showcase in front of Rebeca,” he says. “I sort of interviewed for the job without knowing I was interviewing for the job.”

“He always had this confidence about him that I felt very drawn to,” León says. “Like, whatever he was selling, I was buying.” She told Schafer she thought he would do well in the live business, and about a year later, brought him onto her team at AEG.

In 2013, “the Latin market was very regionalized,” Schafer explains. “Latin touring, per se, in terms of having one promoter go and do all of your shows, was still a new concept.” Alongside León, he strived for the artist-promoter partnership to take a wide-lens view of a given act’s business to help it scale.

Simultaneously, Latin music was experiencing unprecedented mainstream crossover, and it hit new peaks in 2017, when Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s remix of “Despacito” (featuring Justin Bieber) notched 16 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 and J Balvin and Willy William’s “Mi Gente” (featuring Beyoncé) reached No. 3 on the chart. Not that this surprised Schafer. “Really, it was just an easy data point for people to say, ‘Look how big this is,’ ” he says, “and that just reinforced what we already knew. My beliefs were always that this is big. At that moment, there was no way to really quantify how big it was.”

By this point, Schafer’s role in redefining the possibilities of Latin touring was a well-known fact, and Live Nation came knocking by the end of the year with an offer for him to help harness this new — or, rather, newly visible — enthusiasm and build its Latin touring business.

When Schafer stepped into his role as senior vp of global touring, he immediately applied the lessons he’d learned at AEG, and his broader philosophy about Latin music’s popularity. Today, “what we’ve built are the underlying resources for each of the promoters [at the company] to be able to build and scale up the artist’s business while still thinking locally,” he says. Because even as Live Nation sought to expand these artists’ footprints globally, “that still mattered. Having an understanding of what radio stations for specific artists, what areas of the city do you target? It becomes hyperlocalized, and it’s super important to always keep that in mind. It’s not one-size-fits-all.”

Under his leadership, his team has also combined old-school expertise and intuition with cutting-edge analytics to help him push beyond Latin’s still-strong core markets. For instance, while attempting to fill a routing gap on Peso Pluma’s 2023 tour, a Texas-based colleague of Schafer’s suggested Rogers, Ark. “It was the biggest on-sale that venue [the 11,000-capacity Walmart AMP] had ever had, regardless of genre. It ended up working out better than anyone could have ever imagined.”

“[Hans is] just incredibly fearless,” León says. “That’s one of the most important things when you’re a promoter, is you have to have crazy confidence and be bold and take risks.” (“He’s a real daredevil,” she adds. “He’s an adrenaline junkie. He jumps out of planes, he skydives, he paraglides. You could put him in a room full of snakes and he would have the same tone with you.”)

That fearlessness has been most visible at the stadium level. After promoting Los Bukis’ 2021 tour, which grossed $48.4 million across nine shows, “People were asking me, ‘Who else could do it?’ ” Schafer says. His answer: Bad Bunny. Schafer has been instrumental in the Puerto Rican star’s ascent to stadiums and innovative approach to touring — which is, outside of Taylor Swift, arguably the global touring story of the 2020s in any genre. Bad Bunny, ­promoted by Cárdenas Marketing Network, toured North American arenas in early 2022 (to the tune of $116.8 million) — but before that run had even started, he had announced World’s Hottest Tour, a return to the road that August where he would play North and South American stadiums. (U.S. dates on the tour were co-promoted by Live Nation and CMN, while a range of promoters handled its shows outside of the United States.) That outing raked in $314.1 million across 43 shows to close out 2022 — when he topped Billboard’s Top Tours year-end chart, becoming the first artist who doesn’t perform primarily in English to do so.

In early 2024, now under the sole promotion of Live Nation, Bad Bunny’s Most Wanted Tour of North American arenas grossed $211 million. But his touring over the past year cemented his status as a generational stadium talent — all without stepping foot on U.S. soil. His DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS tour, presented alongside Rimas Nation, in support of his Grammy-winning album of the same name, played to 3.1 million fans in stadiums from São Paulo to Stockholm to Sydney en route to an astounding $472.2 million gross.

“This is another example of the U.S. always being talked about as the crown, and in this case, the protagonists ended up being everywhere else,” Schafer says of that most recent tour. “It’s a beautiful story — how this market continues to grow in markets that we never thought possible at a scale that we never thought possible.

“And the great thing, the lesson for me out all of this,” he adds, “is that Benito didn’t become global by becoming less Puerto Rican. The cultural specificity of this album and his music and everything that he’s done up to this point was part of that connection.”

Schafer continues minting touring powerhouses. After switching to Live Nation for tour promotion following her successful post-pandemic Bichota and $trip Love tours, Colombian star Karol G ascended from arenas to stadiums in 2023 with her Mañana Será Bonito outing, which cracked $313.3 million across 65 shows, and in July, she embarked on the yearlong international itinerary for her Viajando Por El Mundo Tropitour, which had already grossed $184.4 million across its first 20 shows through late September.

“Some people see the stadiums and the numbers, but there is so much work behind making those moments possible,” Karol tells Billboard. “Hans has been an important part of that process for me and for so many Latin artists. He has a real understanding of the global potential of our music and has helped create opportunities for us to dream bigger, not just in terms of the size of the shows, but in where we can take our music and who we can reach.”

And across the diverse genres that now comprise the Latin ecosystem, major new headliners continue to emerge with Live Nation’s backing: Rauw Alejandro, Feid, Young Miko, Rawayana and more. Critically, Schafer and his team have fostered these artists’ careers for years, long before they were playing to tens of thousands. “Our interest is what happens before the stadium,” he says. A key priority, and example of this, has been Schafer’s team’s investment in ­regional Mexican artists, as Live Nation has propelled not only Peso, but also Fuerza Regida, Tito Double P and Grupo Frontera to significantly larger stages.

And just as Schafer expanded the map for these artists within the United States, he’s now using Live Nation’s resources to put on concerts in regions that haven’t previously been serviced by mainstream touring. While he hasn’t been directly involved with Live Nation’s spree of deals in Latin America — in recent years, the promoter has acquired majority stakes in promoters including Argentina’s DF Entertainment, Peru’s Bizarro, Chile’s DG Medios and, most significantly, Mexico’s OCESA — he has been able to harness these regional operations to inform global touring plans in the same way he relies on regional expertise within the United States. He’s also promoting “all levels of artists” in Europe (“a big priority”) and working to expand their touring into Australia and Asia. “Asia is something that still feels uncharted, and that for me is the most exciting thing that’s to come,” he says.

As Schafer eyes this next frontier, he’s holding onto the mindset that got him this far. “The story media tells is the crossover of these artists — but it’s completely the opposite,” he says. “That’s the beauty of where music is headed for Latin — and all non-English-speaking artists.”

This story appears in the Oct. 10, 2026, issue of Billboard.