- A single Bad Bunny or Karol G stadium show runs on a traveling core of roughly 100 to 130 riggers, carpenters and technicians, plus hundreds of local stagehands hired city by city to build and strike the set.
- Karol G's new tour needs 100 trucks just to haul its stage across the United States, while Bad Bunny's touring career has now crossed $1 billion in gross ticket revenue, a first for any Latin artist.
- Studies of what Bad Bunny's 31-show homecoming residency in San Juan put into Puerto Rico's economy range from $53.5 million to $713 million, depending on which firm ran the numbers.
- A certified rigger, who installs the trusses holding up lights and screens, typically earns $20 to $30 an hour, with no guarantee of steady work between tours.
Nobody buys a ticket to watch a rigger. But without one, there's no truss to hang the screens on, no screens to show Bad Bunny's face to the back row, and no show at all. Behind the artists filling stadiums night after night sits an almost entirely uncredited workforce, and this year that workforce has never had more work to do.
Two tours, one logistical headache
Karol G's Viajando Por El Mundo Tropitour opened July 24 at Chicago's Soldier Field and is booked through 65 dates across the United States, Canada, Latin America and Europe into 2027. The set changes six times over a two-and-a-half-hour show, and moving that production across U.S. venues alone takes 100 trucks, Karol G told Vogue's podcast The Run Through. Her last outing, the Mañana Será Bonito World Tour, sold more than 2.3 million tickets over 62 shows and grossed over $300 million.
Bad Bunny closed his own run in July: the Debí Tirar Más Fotos World Tour wrapped in Brussels after 57 shows, pushing his career touring revenue past $1 billion, the first time any Latin artist has cleared that mark, according to Billboard Boxscore figures. Before any of those stadium dates, he sold out 31 straight shows at San Juan's Coliseo de Puerto Rico.
The crew you never see on camera
Behind the LED walls and pyrotechnics travels a fixed team of riggers, carpenters, audio and video technicians and catering staff that typically numbers between 100 and 130 people on a major stadium production. That traveling crew lands in each city and leans on hundreds of local stagehands, hired through the venue, who assemble and tear down the stage in a matter of hours.
Jonquil Garrick-Reynolds is a Dominican-Canadian stagehand and wardrobe technician who has spent nearly three decades in live theater in Ottawa as a member of IATSE Local 471, the union that represents live-event technicians in the U.S. and Canada. Her story isn't tied to Bad Bunny's or Karol G's specific crews, but it captures what draws Latino workers into a trade built on invisible labor: "Theatre gave me that place and sense of belonging."
What a stadium residency actually leaves behind
Just how much Bad Bunny's 31 nights at El Choli meant for Puerto Rico's economy depends entirely on who's counting. An economist at the University of Puerto Rico's Río Piedras campus, Indira Luciano Montalvo, put the most conservative figure at $53.5 million, made up of $27 million in direct spending and $26.5 million indirect.
A preliminary study for San Juan's municipal government put the total closer to $344 million and estimated 3,352 jobs, most of them direct. Consulting firm Gaither International later put the figure much higher, at $713 million, while a separate count found 3,642 direct jobs and more than 46,000 hotel room-nights booked over the residency. None of these figures measure the same thing the same way, which is exactly why they shouldn't be treated as interchangeable.
Physical work, modest pay at the bottom rung
That assembly line doesn't always run on comfortable terms. A group of venue workers in Washington, D.C., outside the Bad Bunny or Karol G circuit but typical of the trade more broadly, recently petitioned to unionize over inconsistent schedules and wages barely above minimum. "I love working here, but we just want better support from our employer," door staffer Hunter Spears said of conditions at four D.C. venues.
Certified riggers, who install the rigging that holds lights and video walls, currently earn a national median of roughly $25 an hour for concert rigging work, with most jobs paying between $20 and $30, and specialized entertainment-rigging roles top out closer to $75,000 a year for the most experienced hires. Entry-level stagehands earn considerably less and work show to show, with no guarantee of being rehired for the next tour that rolls through town.
A workforce nobody is really counting
There's no official tally of how many of these traveling technicians are Latino. The closest available data point comes from outside live touring altogether: a federal study found Latinos made up 18% of the overall U.S. workforce but just 12% of jobs in media and entertainment, concentrated more in service roles than technical or leadership ones. That figure describes the broader entertainment and media industry as measured in 2019, not stadium rigging specifically, and it's the best public estimate available.
Bad Bunny and Karol G keep breaking box-office records. What their tours leave behind in the hands of the people who build and strike each stadium remains the part of the business nobody bothers to measure, because the studies count what the fans spent, almost never what the crew took home.
