The Sound of the Diaspora

SABOR Records is a Miami-based independent record label, music distributor, and publishing administrator built for Latino artists across every genre — reggaeton, dembow, salsa, bachata, cumbia, Latin trap, Afrobeats fusion, corridos, funk carioca, bomba, plena, and everything the Latino experience produces. We operate three business units under one roof so that every artist who signs with us has a label developing their career, a distribution infrastructure delivering their music to every platform in the world, and a publishing operation collecting every dollar their compositions earn across 22 countries — all under one agreement, all under one team, all with one set of terms that never changes regardless of who you are or how many streams you have.

Those terms are published on this website. We did that on purpose. Read them before you call us. We want you to know exactly what you are walking into.

NiCalé Cruz spent a decade inside the major label system. She worked in A&R. She worked in distribution. She worked in publishing administration. At every level and in every role, she learned the same thing from a different angle — that the infrastructure of the music industry was built to serve the company that owns it, not the artists who power it. She watched Latino artists generate billions of streams and receive a fraction of what those streams were worth. She watched publishing royalties sit unclaimed in collection society databases because nobody had registered the compositions properly. She watched artists sign contracts they did not fully understand, written by lawyers who worked for the label, covering terms that would bind them for a decade. She watched people who looked like her and came from where she came from build the culture that the industry monetized — and receive almost none of the infrastructure that monetization required.

She built SABOR Records because that infrastructure needed to exist and it did not.

NiCalé Cruz is a Puerto Rican music executive and the Founder and CEO of SABOR Records. She is the first Latina to found and lead an independent vertically integrated music company — label, distribution, and publishing under one roof — with publicly transparent, artist-first contract terms built specifically for Latino artists.

She did not build SABOR because she saw a market opportunity. She built it because she spent ten years inside the system that was failing the community she came from, learning with precise specificity where every dollar went and why it stopped reaching the artists who earned it. When she had learned everything she needed to know, she left. And then she built the alternative.

At SABOR, artists keep their masters. Splits are 80/20 in the artist’s favor from the first dollar. Creative control is written into every contract. Masters revert to the artist after seven years regardless of performance. There is no 360 deal. There is no publishing grab. There is no clause designed to protect the label at the artist’s expense. These are not aspirational values. They are the actual terms of every contract we sign. You can read them on this website right now.

When SABOR launched and published those terms publicly, the industry called it naive. The artists called it and sent 4,000 demo submissions in 72 hours. Cruz answered every one of them personally in the first week.

She still picks up the phone on Saturday mornings.

We believe the contract is the relationship. Everything else is just music.

We believe that a Latino artist who generates a hundred million streams has earned the infrastructure that a hundred million streams should buy — professional distribution, publishing administration, editorial pitching, sync licensing, and a team that answers the phone. We built that infrastructure so it does not have to be negotiated for. It comes standard.

We believe that the Afro Latino and Latino music community has powered decades of global culture — salsa, reggaeton, dembow, cumbia, Latin trap, funk carioca, champeta, bomba, corridos, and every genre that grew from the African and Indigenous roots of the Americas — and has received a fraction of the credit, the ownership, and the financial return that contribution deserved. SABOR exists to change the math on that equation one artist at a time.

We believe in transparency because secrecy in the music business has never protected the artist. It has always protected the label. We are the label. We published our contracts anyway.

If you are an independent Latino artist at any stage of your career — emerging, rising, or established — and you are looking for a home that will give you the infrastructure to build a sustainable career without asking you to give up what makes that career worth building, we want to hear from you.

Submit your music at the link below. We listen to everything. We respond to everyone. We are not a filter or an algorithm or an automated system. We are a team of people who love this music and built a company specifically to serve it.

If you are a music industry professional interested in joining the team, our open positions are listed at the link below. Every role at SABOR is for someone who understands the culture they are serving — not just the business of it.

If you are a journalist, press contact, sync supervisor, brand partner, or industry executive, reach us at press@saborrecords.com.