Why is country music booming in Brazil?
As Big Agriculture transforms the country, a homegrown musical style—and a new kind of cowboy chic—is moving from its rural roots to the center of the popular culture.
The band was still tuning up when the first screams pealed through the crowded fairgrounds in Cuiabá, a regional capital in Brazil’s farm belt. A few feet from the stage, a 10-year-old girl in a spangled black cowboy hat, sequined jeans, and embroidered leather boots added hers to the mix, her cheeks wet with happy tears. Her eyes were locked on Ana Castela, the reigning star of Brazilian country music, as she owned the main stage at the Expoagro. “She is incredible, wonderful,” the young girl gushed afterward. “She’s perfect.”
Castela, a 22-year-old velvet-voiced pop diva with a Latin Grammy in her saddlebag and 15.4 million monthly listeners on Spotify, is the latest idol from Brazil’s homegrown style of music called sertanejo. The folk music began in the sertão, the country’s hardscrabble backlands, but has since modernized, electrified, and taken over the charts with everything from torch songs to subgenres like agronejo, with its odes to Big Agriculture. (As one hit song’s lyrics go: Hey, hey, hey, spraying poison from the plane.) Today the most popular sound in Brazilian music exalts a saddles-and-pickups spirit buoyed by the conversion of forests, prairies, and savannas into commodity crops, livestock ranches, and a trade surplus.
“Half of the music consumed in Brazil today is sertanejo. The other half is everything else,” said former president of Sony Music Brasil Paulo Junqueiro, who helped oversee the explosion of country music. “So we are talking about a genre that represents half the output of all new artists.” No rodeo or farm expo (and there are hundreds across Brazil every year) is complete without a lineup of sertanejo artists crooning to stadium-size crowds.
Here in Cuiabá—capital of Mato Grosso state, the epicenter of the country’s richest farmland—the city’s annual Expoagro is part trade fair and part Coachella, where sertanejo fans sport fringe jackets and belt buckles the size of hubcaps. Bull riding and heavy machinery showcases fill the schedule. Executive jets streak overhead, shuttling farm moguls from deal to deal, all while Castela delivers her 2025 hit “Olha Onde Eu Tô” (“Look Where I Am”), with a defiant chorus that sings, He wanted me to move from the country / He told me to choose between rodeo and love.
Behind the sertanejo boom is an economic and demographic upheaval that is turning Latin America’s largest country inside out. Agribusiness, which drives about 29 percent of GDP, has shifted population, power, and wealth inland. Brazil is now the world’s leading exporter of soybeans, coffee, beef, sugar, and more. “Sertanejo represents this part of Brazil that works, which is led by Brazilian agribusiness,” says Mato Grosso governor Mauro Mendes.
But how did country music take over one of Latin America’s most urbanized nations—particularly one known for a stylish cool emanating from cultural epicenters like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo? As Brazil’s ranchers and planters prospered, their scions moved to the cities to study, bringing their guitars. They blended rock and pop and cranked the volume to 11. The result: university sertanejo, an eclectic subgenre that’s now ubiquitous on the airwaves. “Sertanejo is the Brazilian popular music nowadays,” says Wander Oliveira, managing partner of Workshow, the nation’s leading producer of country music.
(Black artists are at the roots of country music in the United States.)
That explains why a claimed 300,000 came to the Expoagro in Cuiabá this past July, and why two million revelers gathered in downtown São Paulo, Latin America’s financial center, to hear country duo Bruno & Marrone ring in New Year 2025. And also why, when fabled balladeer Marília Mendonça was killed in a plane crash in 2021 at the age of 26, her funeral cortege in Goiânia was broadcast nationwide.
Paradoxically, the music is inspired by cherished pastoral traditions and pristine landscapes, both of which are receding with every harvest as cowboys are increasingly replaced by machines. But that’s not (yet) the concern of sertanejo. When it’s not full-throated agronejo, Brazil’s biggest pop music is all about jilted lovers, longing, and heartbreak composed to bring even country roughs to tears. And what was once a conservative genre has loosened with the times. Women—Mendonça, Castela, Simone Mendes—dominate the charts; some of the star cowgirls (Bruna “Viola” Kamphorst, Lauana Prado) prefer other cowgirls. Twin-sister act Maiara & Maraisa helped break the ceiling for the women of sertanejo, writing, in their words, about “cachaça and romanticism, infidelity and passion—men’s stuff!”
Sertanejo has come a long way since first being dismissed by urbanites as lullabies for caipiras, or yokels—country music headliners produced nine of the 10 most popular albums on Brazilian Spotify from 2014 to 2023. If there’s one more accolade to earn, it’s global recognition; for all its stardom and radio dominance, sertanejo remains largely landlocked. Sung exclusively in Portuguese, it has not swept the international stage. For now, its superstars are plenty busy in Brazil, crooning for cowboys and 10-year-old girls and everyone in between, all while fueling the biggest pop music playlist the rest of the world has yet to hear.
