As the eighth-biggest act globally on Spotify, with 73 million monthly listeners there (as well as 46 million followers on Instagram and 46.5 million subscribers on YouTube), Puerto Rican star Bad Bunny is never going to struggle to get attention for any new project he undertakes.

On Instagram he prefers to use Stories rather than standard posts (he still only has one post on his grid) and it was there that he announced he had set up a WhatsApp Channel (allowing one-way communication from a celebrity or brand) the day after the messaging company announced the feature was going live in over 150 markets.

In under a fortnight of it launching, Bad Bunny had amassed over 12 million followers. As we  say, he really does not have to scrabble around for attention. His first message proper was a pensive selfie (although the actual first message, intriguingly, was deleted). Thereafter there has been a flurry of several posts a day, all in Spanish. Each one gets reactions in the hundreds of thousands.

(It is a hugely encouraging development that he feels under no pressure or obligation to communicate here in English, something that would have been inconceivable even 15 years ago for a Latin act who was looking to have a global impact.)

Gathering a head of steam on the app – and building up a staggering number of followers incredibly quickly – he teased that his final new track of 2023 would be out before the end of September, posting a 16-second audio clip of it within his Channel on 24 September.

True to his word, the full version new track, ‘Un Preview’, came out on 25 September, with a message on WhatsApp for fans to click through to their DSP of choice (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon Music, Tidal, Deezer or Pandora).

He added that (translating from Spanish) the track had that title because it is “a small preview of what is coming next year”.

It has long been the case that a new platform/app will work closely with a musician or other star to help it launch with a bang, but in this case WhatsApp, with its 2.7 billion monthly users, does not really need celebrity endorsements and amplification.

What is most interesting here is just how quickly Bad Bunny embraced the new feature and jumped into it with vigour. How long he maintains his regular WhatsApp messaging remains to be seen, but so far no one can accuse him of slacking here.

There will be, however, a delicate balancing act. Here is a direct and powerful communication channel with an audience who have to actively sign up for messages: not enough messaging and they will drift away; too much messaging and they will leave or – oh, the humanity! – put notifications on silent (just like everyone does when added to a group they have little interest in) and eventually just… forget about it.