Music is also often used for sociopolitical purposes ranging from protest to solidarity, usually involving a specific narrative. As one of many possible examples, consider the Mexican corrido, a narrative form that tells a story, verse by verse. The corrido is a sort of musical newspaper with stories that usually center around some political event. In the 19th century, the verses of the corridos came from large fliers, or broadsheets, which circulated around towns and villages to transmit the news of the day. A favorite topic was the Mexican Revolution. Many corridos, however, cannot really be said to have any fixed text, since there are so many variants between written versions; in addition, a good number of them are improvised spontaneously. Usually all the verses are set with the same music, a format that is called strophic.

Protest songs are a longstanding vernacular tradition in Latin America. The patriarch of Latin American protest singers was the Argentine singer and songwriter Héctor Roberto Chavero Haram (1908–1992), better known by his artistic name Atahualpa Yupanqui, which he chose to honor two legendary Incan chieftains: Atahualpa and Pachacuti Yupanqui. As a communist, he was censored in the 1950s by the government of Juan Perón, husband of Eva Perón ("Evita"), so he lived in exile for a time. Other artists, chief among them Mercedes Sosa, popularized his songs.

The tradition of protest songs in the United States is a long one that dates back to the 18th century and colonial period, the American Revolutionary War and its aftermath. In the 19th century, topical subjects for protest in song included abolition, slavery, poverty, and the Civil War among other subjects. In the 20th century civil liberties, civil rights, women's rights, economic injustice, politics and war were among the popular subjects for protest in song. In the 21st century the long tradition continues.

During the 1960s, many Latin American countries were suffering military coups and oppressive dictatorships. In Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay opponents to such regimes were eliminated in mass killings, or "disappearances," as some of these governments euphemistically called them. Others who questioned military authority were forced to live abroad. Protests were stirring elsewhere in the world, too. In the final years of the Franco dictatorship, Spain was restless for civil liberties, and the United States was convulsed over the struggle for racial equality and conflict over the Vietnam war. In each of these scenarios, music played a key role in making people aware of prevailing circumstances.

One case in point is Argentina, a country that endured a military dictatorship from 1966 to 1973 only to undergo another coup in 1976, resulting in a regime even more brutal than the previous one, during which systematic "disappearing" of around 30,000 political opponents was undertaken. Mercedes Sosa, a folk singer of mestizo background and a supporter of left-wing causes, was arrested on stage during a concert in 1979. Forced to move to Europe, first to Paris and then Madrid, she returned to Argentina only when the dictatorship was in its final throes. Her powerful role as an artist who fought for freedom was summed up after her death in 2009, when Helen Popper of Reuters wrote "she fought South America's dictators with her voice and became a giant of contemporary Latin American music".