Ivan Cornejo On How TikTok Kickstarted His Career, Who He Wants To Work With & More | Billboard Cover

Rising regional Mexican star Ivan Cornejo talks about how he started singing, kickstarting his career on TikTok, how Natanael Cano inspired him to make regional Mexican music, which artists and producers he wants to work with, the future of regional Mexican music and more!

Ivan Cornejo:
It’s a good feeling you know being an influence. And I remember what I used to feel like wanting to be a musician it’s a good feeling when I hear kids telling me that they picked up the guitar because of it.

Ivan Cornejo:
I started playing guitar around seven years old, it was kind of like my way of making like 20 bucks for the weekend or something my dad would tell me to like learn like Joan Sebastian songs and just like oldies songs, he’d be like, and I’ll give you five bucks for each song. And at seven years old five bucks is a lot of money. So I was just collecting my my little royalties back then. Around the time that T3R Elemento was dropping music. “Rafa Caro,” I remember like I heard that.

Ivan Cornejo:
And it like, stood out to me so much I think that I was just like hmm I actually like this. At the time, I wouldn’t really listen to regional music. It was more of like my dad’s Mariachi music and like the old school stuff. A couple of years later, Natanael Cano drops, you know, corridos tumbados. He’s definitely like a pioneer for this new genre that you call salsa reino and like corridos tumbados, so many people got inspiration from that, that he really took a big step and just changed the whole corridor feel like a lot of people just adapted to that quickly. I started with TikTok and Instagram, you know, just posting my videos. After I started getting recognition with the covers, seeing a lot of comments supporting me, as you know, motivates you to just write your own music and I started writing my own songs, I dropped my first song, I got signed to a label, and I dropped two albums with that label. Now I’m just working on my third album, it was a big change. For me, I love those tech talks. And then, you know, there’s like labels reaching out. It was like a mini dream country. You know, it was what I’ve always wanted.

Watch the full video above!