Gabito Ballesteros Launches HitKidz Records, Signs 15-Year-Old Kanito Escalante as First Artist
Gabito Ballesteros has launched his own record label, HitKidz Records, with 15-year-old Kanito Escalante as its first signed artist, Billboard reported on August 20. The label's debut release, a track called "Cali," drops the same day.
"Cali" is a collaboration featuring Escalante alongside Calle 24, El Bogueto and Ballesteros himself. The music video premieres at 8 p.m. ET and places the four artists on the beaches of Cali, Colombia, in a tropical setting. Billboard
Escalante, whose real name is Enrique Escalante, comes from Puerto Peñasco, Sonora — a fishing and tourism town on the Sea of Cortez in northwestern Mexico. He began experimenting with music at a very young age and started sharing it on TikTok, where he quickly built a following. He is 15 years old.
Ballesteros laid out the thinking behind the label in an interview with Billboard Español. He said HitKidz Records follows in the footsteps of his brother Natanael Cano, known as Nata, and the corridos tumbados movement — the genre that fused traditional Mexican corridos with hip-hop and trap elements, pioneered largely by Cano and his contemporaries in the late 2010s.
For Ballesteros, the label is a chance to do for emerging talent what his brother's movement did for a generation of regional Mexican artists: open doors on their own terms. By signing a teenager who built his audience on a phone app rather than through traditional label development, Ballesteros is betting on the same short-form-video-to-streaming pipeline that has reshaped how Latin music reaches listeners in recent years.
The details are otherwise sparse. No further signings have been announced, and the label's distribution or major-label partnership arrangements, if any, were not specified in the Billboard report.
What is clear is the roster's opening hand: a multi-artist single, a beachfront video, and a 15-year-old from Sonora getting his first major-platform release on a label built by one of regional Mexican music's current crop of hitmakers. "Cali" will be the measure of whether that hand plays.
