For 14 years, Juan Luis Morera Luna and Llandel Veguilla Malave have respectively been Wisin and Yandel, the most successful reggaeton duo on Billboard’s charts, with 10 No. 1s on Hot Latin Songs, a record for a duo in any genre.
Now, half of that duo is ready for the solo spotlight, even as Wisin & Yandel continue to work and tour together.
Last week, Yandel released the single “Hable de Ti” and announced plans to put out a solo album, “La Leyenda,” by the end of the summer.
While Wisin & Yandel have long been signed to Machete, the urban imprint of Universal Music Latin Entertainment, that deal is up and Yandel is now seeking a new label. In the meantime, he’s funding, producing and releasing on his own, through his label Y Entertainment.
“I’ve been working so long as a duo, I wanted to make my own decisions. I reached that point where I ended my contract with Universal [and] with management, and I want to do what I feel, not what other people tell me,” Yandel says, speaking exclusively with Billboard at the Miami Beach offices of Summa Entertainment, which he hired to promote and market the new project.
“When Yandel stopped by our offices to discuss his new project, I was expecting to hear a song or two,” Summa president Gabriel Buitrago says. “Instead he presented me a complete album, his new single, the concept for his new video and the complete vision for his upcoming release. So from that day on we have been working together on setting up.”
The first action was releasing “Hable de Ti,” which premiered exclusively on more than 25 Univision Radio stations across the country on June 7. The song was released to iTunes the week of June 10, and Yandel is in conversations to perform it live on Univision’s Premios Juventud telecast in July.
Wisin & Yandel are still bound by several high-profile sponsorships, including Coors Light and Panasonic, and still touring together and planning to record again as a duo. In fact, Yandel’s new single and album are being promoted on Wisin & Yandel’s website, and one of several lyric videos of the single was uploaded to the pair’s YouTube channel.
Still, Yandel is doing his own thing, on his own terms, and, for now, on his own dime.
“I’ll never stop working with Wisin because it’s 14 years of music and we have a very beautiful personal relationship,” Yandel says. “His son is my godson and I’m his daughter’s godfather. But this is about business…It’s a respite we’re both taking.”
The respite extends to management. Although Edgar Andino, who assumed the duo’s management in 2005, will continue to handle the act, Yandel is seeking a new handler for his solo career, and is in conversations with publishers, as his deal with Universal Music Publishing Group also expired.
He’s also putting the finishing touches on the 16-track album he expects to release later this summer. Although Yandel is meeting with labels-including one mainstream label-he says he isn’t close to making a decision. Instead, the immediate focus is on making a splash with the single and the video, which was shot in Los Angeles and directed by longtime friend/collaborator Carlos Perez of Elastic People. In the meantime, there are already nearly a dozen lyric videos of “Hable de Ti” on YouTube, each clip receiving between 46,000 and 89,000 plays each.
Yandel says there wasn’t an “a-ha” moment that prompted him to go solo, although he’s long written and produced on his own, and both he and Wisin have released solo albums before.
“For a while now I’d been analyzing why I felt a little lost in my career,” he says. “But I was working, I was doing well, and you stay on that train until you say, ‘Enough, enough.’ I know this is a big decision, and it’s hard as an artist to again prove to people who you are. It’s like starting again.”