Perro Negro
In an exclusive sit-down on the sidelines of Latin GRAMMY week in Las Vegas, Perro Negro co-founder and creative director Alejandro Cardona revealed that the brand behind the Latin GRAMMY Award-winning anthem is officially freezing brick-and-mortar nightclub expansion, pivoting its global footprint into recorded music intellectual property under a landmark joint venture with Rimas Entertainment.
With the international Latin music industry convened on the Strip ahead of the awards ceremony, Cardona confirmed that parent company The Hacienda Co. is transforming the nightlife institution into Perro Negro Label, rolling out its debut five-track extended play, Dale Duro, Vol. 1, and positioning the project as a self-curated recording entity rather than a conventional hospitality franchise. The high-stakes gambit hedges against the capital-intensive overhead of global nightlife real estate while mounting an active offensive against the algorithmic homogenization of Latin urban music on commercial radio and streaming playlists.
“Opening more clubs is not such a scalable business,” said Cardona, confirming in Las Vegas that prospective venue launches in San Juan and Mexico City were reassessed and shelved due to soaring commercial rents and six-figure utility costs. “The next few years we are going to focus on the music business, and let that fuel the club.”
“This is our response to not let reggaeton die; we do not want to let our culture die,” revealed Cardona during the exclusive interview, detailing his frustration with modern urban production formulas. “It is more profound than simple commercialization: we want each release to have a conceptual foundation, real research. From a sound perspective, artists have stopped experimenting; they have fallen into the exact same repetitive formula.”
The partnership with Rimas Entertainment—the San Juan-based powerhouse that releases chart-toppers by Bad Bunny, Mora, and Omar Courtz—adapts an intellectual property blueprint pioneered by European electronic club institutions like Ministry of Sound and Circoloco Records. Rather than signing exclusive artist rosters, the venture credits records directly to Perro Negro as the primary artist, collaborating on an episodic, project-by-project basis with underground vocalists and independent producers.
The debut extended play, Dale Duro, Vol. 1, released across global streaming platforms via Rimas Entertainment, functions as a cross-border sonic survey uniting emerging underground talent from Puerto Rico and Colombia. The project explicitly breaks away from the accelerated tempos of contemporary Latin pop, which routinely cross 100 beats per minute to chase viral dance trends on TikTok. Instead, the five-track collection—anchored by cuts like Ponte Bellaquita featuring Tommy Blanco, VEI HABACHE, and FANTA ROSARIO, as well as La Mi$a with geomafia and Moncas—strictly enforces a vintage tempo pocket between 91 and 96 beats per minute, calibrated with high-pressure sub-bass engineered specifically for professional club sound systems rather than smartphone speakers.
“If something unprecedented doesn’t happen on TikTok and go viral, people won’t listen to it,” warned Cardona, explaining why the label bypassed mainstream radio conventions in favor of spotlighting overlooked underground talent. “It is something very strange—the general audience has become completely closed off to artists who aren’t already consolidated.” To counter that isolation, the project unites street mainstays like Brray and hitmaking Colombian production team The Rudeboyz on the aggressive cut Sin Hueso alongside newcomer Tury, while tapping Colombian-British production duo The Ozakis to helm the dark, UK-bass-influenced perreo track Love & Sex alongside White Lion vocalist Jovaan. The release closes with the unvarnished underground bounce of Garulleo from Colombian artist GeezyDee.
The Las Vegas revelation comes as the brand builds upon the global momentum of PERRO NEGRO, the crossover smash from Bad Bunny and Feid off the 2023 studio album Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana. The track swept global airplay, reached Number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100, and captured Best Reggaeton Performance at the 25th Annual Latin GRAMMY Awards—a historic high-water mark where a record honoring an underground nightlife institution took home the Latin recording academy’s top genre prize. Rather than treating the milestone as a transient promotional spike, The Hacienda Co. co-founders Cardona, Samuel Granados, and Manuel Buitrago leveraged the exposure to build an international footprint, opening high-profile outposts in the Wynwood Arts District of Miami and the luxury Salamanca quarter of Madrid.
Yet even as the corporate group expanded its payroll to hundreds of employees, leadership concluded that physical clubs cannot scale infinitely without diluting curatorial rigor. To preserve its underground credibility across global venues, festival stages like El Templo del Perreo at Festival Estéreo Picnic, and curated takeovers at Japan’s Summer Sonic, the brand relies exclusively on selector talent emerging from its internal Perro Negro DJ Academy in Medellín. Directed by long-time resident Blazekha, the program mandates that resident DJs master traditional Antioquian perreo pacing, extended transition techniques, and historical dembow selections before performing internationally. By transforming its brick-and-mortar basements into real-time test laboratories for Perro Negro Label, the entity is establishing a closed-loop ecosystem where underground music is tested on authentic dance floors, produced under a major distribution pipeline, and released directly to global audiences without bowing to commercial dilution.
About the Author
