Songfacts®:

• In this joyful song, Enrique Iglesias is watching a girl dance, and his heart is aflutter. "Bailando" means "dancing" in Spanish.
  
  Iglesias wrote it with his friend, a Cuban singer named Descemer Bueno. They recorded a demo in Spanish but didn't release it.
  
  Unbeknownst to Iglesias, Bueno went to Cuba and reworked the song with the Cuban reggaetón group Gente De Zona and released it online along with a striking music video. It blew up in Cuba, which Iglesias discovered when a friend in that country heard the song in a taxi and called Enrique to play it for him. "That's my song!" Iglesias said.
  
  Iglesias then revamped the song, adding his voice to it. He did a version with his vocal in English that was released in America and Europe, and a Spanish version that was released elsewhere. The Spanish version proved immensely popular, garnering billions of streams and going to #1 on the Billboard Hot Latin Songs chart for a stunning 41 weeks, blowing past the record held by Shakira when "La Tortura," reigned for 25 weeks beginning in June 2005.
• The English version is really in Spanglish, with Iglesias singing the verses in English but Gente De Zona and Descemer Bueno singing the chorus in Spanish. In the bridge, Iglesias goes Spanglish, singing, "I want to be contigo" ("contigo" means "with you" in Spanish).
  
  This version also features the Jamaican dancehall singer Sean Paul, adding even more spice to this cross-cultural, cross-genre gumbo.
• The music video was directed by Alejandro Perez and shot in both Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Perez shot the video for the original Iglesias-less version in Cuba with dancers from Havana's Ballet Lizt Alfonso (the lead dancer is Ana Karla Suárez). For the new versions (English and Spanish) with Iglesias, he shot footage in the Dominican Republic that he combined with shots from the Cuba shoot. Sean Paul is also in the English version.
• Iglesias had a #1 hit with his 1999 song "Bailamos," which means "we dance" in Spanish. Titling another song after a conjugation of "bailar" is a bit repetitive, but Iglesias was OK with it.
  
  "I sang that, and it just came out naturally," he told People. "I was like, 'Ooh, maybe I shouldn't say 'bailando' because I have a song called 'Bailamos.' But that was the songwriter within you. I thought, 'Ah, whatever.' I knew that it was really good and really catchy, and it just made me feel happy."
• The uptempo tune was used as the theme song for the 2014 Telemundo soap opera, Reina de Corazones. It was the fifth time that one of Iglesias' tunes had been chosen as an opening theme of a telenovela, following "Nunca Te Olvidaré," "Cuando Me Enamoron," "Marisol." and "El Perdedor."
• During the 2014 Billboard Latin Music Conference in Miami, Descemer Bueno talked about how the song evolved after he wrote it with Iglesias. "Enrique and I worked on the song and kind of left it there," he said. "Then I met up with Gente De Zona in Havana, and they added the 'I wanna be contigo' bridge and the 'Oh, oh, oh.' That's the new version Enrique heard. And really, it added and important and energetic element to the song."
• Iglesias released two different Portuguese versions of the song, each with different guest singers (Luan Santana from Brazil and Mickael Carreira from Portugal) and different videos.
• South Floridans Cristian Mauricio Escuti and German Schulz filed a suit on January 26, 2015 in Miami's US District Court claiming that this song rips off their original track, "Quiero Bailar Contigo." The plaintiffs stated that they recorded their tune on or about May 2009 and submitted a recording of their song to Sony/ATV three years later, but never heard back. However, Escuti and Schulz's case is not helped by the fact that "Bailando" was released by Republic, a company with no connection to Sony.
  
  Here is a video of Chayanne performing "Quiero Bailar Contigo." Do you think they are similar?
• In August 2015, the Spanish version of "Bailando" became the first Spanish-language song to reach one billion views on YouTube. It crossed 2 billion in 2017.