ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
Sometimes when I'm at the office here at NPR, I'll be trying to send off a few emails when there's this racket going on a few desks over.
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ELMIENE: I am Elmiene. This is my ridiculous, incredible band.
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RHIAN TEASDALE: It's very cool to be here at NPR Tiny Desk.
LIMBONG: Yep. I sit right by where they record the Tiny Desks. You know them. You love them, particularly the big-name ones do super well, like, Ed Sheeran...
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ED SHEERAN: Touching on your body while you're pushing on me. Don't you end the party, I could do this all week.
LIMBONG: ...Or Taylor Swift...
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TAYLOR SWIFT: (Singing) My heart, my hips, my body, my love. Trying to find a part of me that you didn't touch. Gave up on me like I was a bad drug, now I'm searching for signs in a haunted club.
LIMBONG: ...And, of course, earlier this year, when Bad Bunny made a surprise appearance, performing songs from his massively successful album "Debi Tirar Mas Fotos."
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BAD BUNNY: (Singing in Spanish).
LIMBONG: But this week, a Tiny Desk concert by a group that many of you have probably never heard of exploded faster than videos by some of those A-listers.
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UNIDENTIFIED PUPPETEER #1: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED PUPPETEER #2: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED PUPPETEER #1: Oh.
31 MINUTOS: (Singing in Spanish).
LIMBONG: Treinta Y Un Minutos is a Chilean band made up of wildly talented musicians and wisecracking puppets who are stars across Latin America for the children's show of the same name.
ANAMARIA SAYRE, BYLINE: I don't even know how to describe the level of virality, Andrew, that this video has now achieved. It has broken so many records for the Tiny Desk. It's also just become, like, a cult level of obsessive.
LIMBONG: That's Anamaria Sayre. She is the host of Alt.Latino and programs the special month of El Tiny, the annual Latin music takeover of the Tiny Desk series that wraps up this week.
SAYRE: The president in Chile has been posting about it, the minister of the economy in Mexico - I mean, it's, like, truly gone global.
LIMBONG: So why did 31 Minutos - again, a band that performs in Spanish and gives major "Muppet" vibes - break the internet? And what does that tell us about Tiny Desk and the current cultural and political moments we're in? I called up Anamaria, and she started by tell me a bit about the show.
SAYRE: "Treinta Y Un Minutos" is basically a Chilean children's show that's been around since the early 2000s. It was one of the first pieces actually of collective public children's programming that Chile was able to get off the ground, and it's absolutely beloved in the region - not only in Chile, but in other parts of Latin America. It's a huge point of pride in Chile. It's one of those, like, integral, core childhood, really, really kind of, like, meaningful things for people.
And more than that, the show - I mean, the show is brilliant. It's thoughtful. It's smart. It's critical. It's the first show, a lot of people say, that didn't really treat children like children. They treated children like they could handle social issues and political critique and just, like, actual honest commentary about life. So that's another one of the reasons that it just became immediately valued for people in Chile and really across Latin America.
LIMBONG: This Tiny Desk is doing numbers, right? It is - it's up there in the millions, right?
SAYRE: Mhm.
LIMBONG: Do you have any data? Has this Tiny Desk sort of broken containment? Is this now exported outside?
SAYRE: So yeah, this is insider scoop from looking at the YouTube metrics.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
SAYRE: So for one, this reached a million views within 12 hours, which is...
LIMBONG: Sheesh.
SAYRE: ...One of the fastest.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
SAYRE: It was beat by Billie Eilish, and there may have been one or two others, maybe, but pretty close behind Billie Eilish, which hit a million in 6 hours. It broke Bad Bunny's second-day record. Within that first 10 hours, it was growing at five times the rate of Ca7riel y Paco Amoroso, which is one of our biggest shows ever.
I looked at the data cause I was really curious to kind of compare within that first two days, which is when we first start getting geographic data back. One percent of the people watching it were in the United States. This is obviously a platform based in the United States, but realistically, it's not a U.S. platform, is what I would call it. It is absolutely a global platform, and I think shows like this really reflect that.
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UNIDENTIFIED PUPPETEER #3: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED PUPPETEER #4: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED PUPPETEER #3: Uh-huh.
UNIDENTIFIED PUPPETEER #4: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED PUPPETEER #3: Ah.
MINUTOS: (Singing in Spanish).
SAYRE: So what we're seeing in the metrics - super high proportion in Chile, something in, like, the 20 percentages, and then in the 10s is Mexico 'cause this is obviously a really important show for Mexicans as well. And also they're obviously just a huge population. And then the rest of the breakdown is throughout Latin America.
But that is actually a higher distribution in terms of, like, across country than we saw with Ca7riel y Paco, which, in this same time frame, we saw about, like,50-something percent of our viewers coming from Argentina. All that to say, it is important to note that Santiago, Chile, before any of this, has pretty much always been Tiny Desk's No. 1 city in terms of largest number of viewers, which is insane.
LIMBONG: We're coming to the end of this year's El Tiny - right? - which is when you program artists, mainly Latin American, who perform in Spanish. As we dig into the data by how those videos do, is that reflective? Does that sort of - does that follow the similar pattern that you just laid out?
SAYRE: You know, Andrew, I don't know the individual breakdown of each show, but what I can say is that in the last five years that we've been doing this El Tiny takeover that I've been at this job, our - I mean, the entire demographics of Tiny Desk have actually fundamentally changed. So when we started this in 2021, when I got here, the breakdown of top countries, as far as highest number of viewers goes, was the United States, of course, and then it was something like the U.K., Canada, and I forget - two other European countries. And at this point, the breakdown is top country still United States, then it's Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Spain - something like that. And I'm sure if you were to look at it today, Chile is...
LIMBONG: Is up there, yeah.
SAYRE: ...On its way up.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
SAYRE: Of our top 10 countries, seven of them are out of Latin America. It has become a super pivotal platform for Latin America and also on the reverse. I mean, Latin America is a super important audience for us.
LIMBONG: Yeah, I mean, I think it's clear by those numbers why Latin American artists are important for the Tiny Desk. But what makes the Tiny Desk so important for Latin artists?
SAYRE: It is hard for me in the United States to fully conceptualize the insanity of the fever over some of these shows. I mean, what I'm hearing from friends in Chile is that you walk onto the subway in the morning, and you will have adults watching this children's puppet show crying in collective together. And you walk down the streets, and you can't not hear it. Like, you cannot not hear it in the streets of Chile right now.
And that's, like - there's the numbers of it all, Andrew, but then there's, like, the social, cultural impact. And from what I understand, I mean, baseline, there is just a phenomenon culturally in the world - right? - where, like, U.S. platforms, U.S. awards, are really big validators. They're signs of really big visibility. I mean, it was described to me by their team, the 31 Minutos team, that to come and play Tiny Desk for them was to get an Oscar. And so I think that because Tiny Desk is so direct-to-consumer - it's so raw, it's so true - it means a lot to people, I think, to come and sing what 31 Minutos did, which was pretty overtly political.
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MINUTOS: (Singing in Spanish).
SAYRE: To do that on a stage in the United States felt like a validation of Chilean experience, of Chilean culture, of Chilean social issues, of Chilean - I mean, everything you could think of. To have that on an American stage was validating. And I think also it's a port to the rest of the world. It's a way - it's a transition through to get to Europe, to get to Asia, for Latin Americans to really find worldwide exposure.
And the fascinating thing in all of this is that this show didn't have a layover in the United States. No one's talking about it here. It's got 1% - I think now it's up to 2% of the viewers in the United States. The point is not that it's a U.S. platform. At the end of the day, in the way people are talking about it to me, they see it as a global platform.
LIMBONG: I think it's impossible to sort of separate the work you're doing with El Tiny and the takeover and President Trump's crackdown on immigrants, largely from Spanish-speaking countries. What's it been like sort of navigating all of that and trying to get Latin American artists here, like, in the building, at NPR, for these performances?
SAYRE: Well, there's two parts of that to me, the first being, practically speaking, visas are really challenging right now. So when we talk about getting artists to the Tiny Desk, I've had to cancel a lot of shows this year because artists couldn't get visas in time or visas at all. I've had a lot of questions about safety concerns, about what it would be like to come here. A lot of my artist friends and artist teams are telling me they're really trying to avoid coming here altogether. They're not wanting to tour here. So that's been a challenge in that I'm trying to platform - use this, like I said, global platform to shine a light on a certain part of the world, and it's hard to do that through the vehicle of being physically in this country.
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UNIDENTIFIED PUPPETEER #5: (Non-English language spoken).
SAYRE: The other part of all of this is the political implications of bringing artists who are from Latin America, who are Latino, who speak Spanish, at a moment in this country when, pretty objectively, to exist as a person either from Latin America, of Latin American descent, to create art, to promote art, to talk about Latino issues, is political. You can see that with Bad Bunny and the Super Bowl and the way that people are reacting to that. You can see that with the way that obviously there's been a lot of ICE crackdown. Like, you can see that across the board.
And it is fair, I think, to say that, you know, it is a charged time. It is controversial right now to be promoting Latin American art just because of the state of this country. And my job, ultimately, is not to take a stance on that. My job is to show the work of my community. That has always been my goal with a Tiny Desk, is to just bring art from the Spanish-language worlds, and then everyone else can decide how they feel about that.
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MINUTOS: (Singing in Spanish).
LIMBONG: NPR's Anamaria Sayre is the host of Alt.Latino and is a producer at the Tiny Desk. Anamaria, thank you so much for chatting. This has been great.
SAYRE: Thank you, Andrew. This was awesome.
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MINUTOS: (Singing in Spanish). Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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