What “Feel This Moment” actually is
“Feel This Moment” is Pitbull’s recording, with Christina Aguilera as the featured singer—not an Aguilera single featuring Pitbull and not an unreleased collaboration. It appeared on Pitbull’s seventh studio album, Global Warming, which RCA, Mr. 305 and Polo Grounds released in the United States on November 19, 2012. Apple Music’s album entry confirms that date and identifies the 2012 RCA sound recording; contemporary reporting in the Los Angeles Times likewise announced the November 19 schedule two months beforehand.
That chronology matters because excerpts and blog posts about the collaboration circulated during October 2012. Those posts document pre-release attention, but they do not establish October 22—or any other October date—as a verified commercial release. The defensible sequence is that the collaboration became publicly discussed before the album, arrived officially with Global Warming on November 19, and was subsequently promoted as a single in early 2013. It was therefore neither a lost track nor a leak-only recording. Early online copies should not be confused with the authorized album master.
The later single campaign had several visible stages. Pitbull’s official channel published an authorized lyric video on February 15, 2013. The David Rousseau-directed performance video followed on March 15, as confirmed by the upload date of Pitbull’s official music video. These dates explain why databases may variously associate the song with 2012 or 2013: 2012 is the recording’s album-release year, while 2013 is when it functioned most clearly as a worldwide hit single.
The a-ha connection was licensed authorship, not coincidence
The record’s most immediately recognizable element is the keyboard figure derived from a-ha’s “Take On Me.” It is not merely a vague stylistic resemblance. The official label-supplied YouTube metadata names a-ha members Pål Waaktaar, Morten Harket and Magne Furuholmen among the composers, alongside Pitbull, Chantal Kreviazuk, Nasri Atweh, Adam Messinger, Nolan Lambroza and Urales Vargas. The same metadata credits Messinger, Sir Nolan, DJ Buddha and Nasri with production or instrumental roles. A MusicBrainz release record also identifies the release as official and links its publishing information.
That formal credit is crucial. “Feel This Moment” repurposes one of the 1980s’ most identifiable synth melodies within a new composition whose verses, chorus and production serve Pitbull’s early-2010s dance-pop language. Calling it a cover would be misleading: Pitbull and Aguilera do not perform “Take On Me” with new scenery. Calling the resemblance accidental would be equally wrong. It is a cleared musical borrowing reflected in the songwriting credits.
Musically, the interpolation does two jobs. First, it supplies instant recognition across generations and markets. Second, it changes emotional function. In a-ha’s record, the ascending figure feels breathless and slightly precarious; under Pitbull’s clipped verses and Aguilera’s sustained chorus, it becomes a victory signal. That is interpretation rather than a documented statement of intent, but it helps explain why the borrowed motif fits a song about briefly inhabiting success before it disappears.
Why Aguilera is the record’s dramatic center
Pitbull’s verses use his familiar compressed method: autobiographical hustle, aphorisms, multilingual identity and luxury references arrive in fast succession. Aguilera has the opposite assignment. She stretches the chorus into broad, open vowels and gives the arrangement the melodic scale required for arenas and televised performances.
The contrast is structural, not ornamental. Without her, the production risks becoming another rapid-fire Pitbull club record; without him, the chorus would lack the restless narrative that makes “the moment” feel earned. Aguilera’s voice also brings an interesting tension. Rather than deploying the most elaborate runs associated with her ballads, she largely serves the hook’s clean geometry, adding force without obscuring the a-ha-derived contour.
The official metadata does not list Aguilera as one of the songwriters, despite some less reliable databases doing so. The careful formulation is that she is the featured vocalist and central melodic performer, while the documented composition credits belong to the writers identified by the label-supplied data. That distinction does not diminish her contribution; it separates performance credit from authorship.
From album track to international hit
The single’s commercial life decisively exceeded the pre-release blog chatter. In Britain, the Official Charts Company records a number-five peak, four weeks inside the Top 10 and 15 weeks on the main singles chart. The song also reached number one on the UK Dance Singles Chart. In the United States, archived Billboard material shows it returning to its number-eight Hot 100 peak in April 2013, while the year-end ranking placed it among 2013’s major pop records.
That rise coincided with mass-audience promotion. A March 12 announcement from Paramount and Nickelodeon billed Pitbull and Aguilera for a Kids’ Choice Awards performance, explicitly describing “Feel This Moment” as Pitbull’s new single. The wording captures its transitional status: the track had already been commercially available on an album for months, but its dedicated single and television campaign was then gathering speed.
The video reinforced the song’s premise with black-and-white touring footage, crowds, private travel and images of both stars at work. Rather than inventing a conventional narrative, it treats access itself as the spectacle. Rousseau’s editing turns fleeting backstage fragments into evidence of a career moving too quickly to hold still. Aguilera appears as a glamorous counterweight to Pitbull’s on-the-road momentum, while the chorus repeatedly opens the cramped backstage world into the scale of the audience.
A revealing artifact of early-2010s pop
“Feel This Moment” sits near the peak of the period when EDM textures, rap verses and enormous sung hooks were routinely engineered for the same radio record. Pitbull had become especially effective at that architecture: a recognizable melodic anchor, a major guest vocalist and verses built for quick transitions rather than extended storytelling. Global Warming presented the model almost as a manifesto, surrounding him with international pop collaborators.
What keeps this song distinctive is the emotional usefulness of its borrowed motif. Nostalgia is not an incidental garnish; it is the musical representation of a moment already slipping into memory. That reading is interpretive, but the record’s continued recognizability supports it. The synth line recalls an earlier pop era, Pitbull speaks from the accelerated present, and Aguilera makes the chorus sound suspended between them.
The reliable historical summary is therefore straightforward. “Feel This Moment” was previewed and discussed before release, officially issued on Global Warming on November 19, 2012, and transformed into a major single through its 2013 lyric video, official video, television appearances and chart run. Its a-ha connection is documented in the credits, not a bootlegger’s mash-up, and its defining collaboration is exactly the one advertised: Pitbull featuring Christina Aguilera.