Tony Mojena, executive producer of the Billboard Latin Music Awards, is prepping for what may be most-viewed installment of the 20-year-old show. The awards will air live on Telemundo from Miami’s Bank United Center on April 23, beginning with the red carpet arrivals at 7 p.m. The show will air in 50 countries, the most-ever for the program, which netted a 43% increase in viewers last year. Mojena spoke to Billboard about what goes into the production.
The Billboard Latin Awards have featured Anglo artists too. Why?
TM: I see the show as a tribute to music. It’s a night for the music industry, a night to sit down and celebrate our accomplishments and what we love so much. It’s a celebration of Latin music, but we try to have music from all genres, tropical, urban, regional Mexican, pop. At a certain point we thought it would be refreshing to have a guest who wasn’t Latin. Even Mary J. Blige, we combined her with Arturo Sandoval. They see it as a tribute to Latin music and an opportunity to do something different. But we haven’t always had one we’ve only had four mainstream artists.
The show has a lot of credibility and the number of countries it’s in has gone up from year to year. This year we’re going for 50 countries where it’ll be shown. It was shown in 35 countries last year.
As a producer, what are you looking to accomplish with a show like this?
My principal goal is putting on a first-rate show, so that the artists think, of all the shows there are, I want to be on this one. Or all those who are sitting at home watching who want to be artists, want to be on the show someday. That’s why we look for the right logistics with all the stars in Latin music and seek to combine them. It’s one of the challenges we have.
How have you increased the ratings over the years?
We’ve been raising the quality of production and the quality of our talent. We get more and more stars to participate in the show. It’s impressive the amount of talent that performs on the show. We communicate with the artist and get the most out of their performance. How do we get better with the lighting, the effects, and how do we choose that song that the public will want to hear? It doesn’t matter if it’s No. 1 or No. 10 on the charts. How do we get the most out of it?
How do you balance different music tastes on the East Coast and West Coast into one national broadcast?
Very simple, we try first to make sure that everything there is good, whether they are from the East Coast or the West Coast. [So that] the staging is so good, that you see it and say, this is well done, with the dancing and costumes. And that the show has a dynamic flow, [so viewers will say] ‘I’m not familiar with this, but soon somebody I know will come on.’ We have good representation of all the genres. Artists have their cycles; sometimes there are lot of Mexican artists, or a lot of pop artists. We try to choose among what’s happening at the moment.
How do you deal with pressure from labels to get their artists on the show? I don’t count how many artists this or that label has. I don’t look at whether a label has five artists performing one year or one the next year. It has to be about, what kind of year has that artist had, and what do we need to make good television?
What’s the most difficult number you’ve ever produced?
One with Daddy Yankee that we did a few years ago. It started in a Hovercraft and it went from one side to the other and he finally landed onstage. Another one we taped with Paulina Rubio where she sang on the beach in a truck. There was another with Olga Tañón with fire and rain onstage. All the dancers ended up wet after.
