Prince Royce

Prince Royce, the stage name of Geoffrey Royce Rojas, is among the singers who carried bachata — the guitar-centered music and partner dance that coalesced in the Dominican Republic and was long dismissed as poor people's music despite the African-descended musicians who shaped it — from its island origins into the mainstream of early twenty-first-century United States Latin pop.^[1] Reference catalogues list him plainly as an American singer, a label that understates his part in reshaping how a once-rural Dominican guitar tradition reached bilingual urban audiences.^[2] Born on May 11, 1989, and raised in the Bronx, Royce belonged to the New York–born generation of Dominican migrants' children for whom bachata was at once an ancestral inheritance and a living commercial form — the milieu from which urban bachata, the New York Dominican style that fused the genre with R&B and hip-hop, had emerged as immigrants transplanted bachata to the city across the 1980s and 1990s.^[1] His parents had emigrated from the Dominican Republic — his father drove a taxi, his mother worked in a beauty salon — placing the household firmly in the working-class immigrant Bronx of the era.^[3]

Royce's path into music began in childhood, with an elementary-school choir and neighborhood talent shows, before an adolescent fascination with poetry hardened, around the age of thirteen, into songwriting.^[4] As a teenager he recorded alongside a partner known as Jino, the two performing as a duo, and he adopted the stage name Prince Royce at sixteen.^[4] His decisive stylistic commitment came as reggaeton's commercial momentum was fading, prompting him to concentrate on bachata rather than the urban genre then receding from the Latin market.^[5]

The pivotal break came at nineteen, when Royce met the manager Andrés Hidalgo, who steered him toward bachata and introduced him to the producer Sergio George; George signed him to his independent Top Stop Music label after hearing only three demos.^[6] Their collaboration produced Royce's eponymous debut, his first full-length album.^[7] Released on March 2, 2010, the record delivered two commercially decisive singles — a Spanish-language reworking of "Stand by Me" and the original "Corazón Sin Cara" — both of which topped the Billboard Tropical Songs chart, with the latter also reaching number one on Hot Latin Songs.^[8]

Recognition followed quickly. The album first entered the Top Latin Albums chart at number 16 before climbing to number one on both that ranking and the Tropical Albums chart, and at the 2011 Billboard Latin Music Awards Royce took three prizes, among them Tropical Album of the Year; the RIAA certified the debut triple platinum in the Latin field that October and eightfold platinum by 2018.^[9] His second album, Phase II (2012), again reached number one on the Latin and Tropical album charts, yielding the singles "Las Cosas Pequeñas" and "Incondicional" and earning a Latin Grammy nomination for Best Tropical Fusion Album.^[10]

A third album, Soy el Mismo, arrived in 2013 led by "Darte un Beso" — a bachata single released on July 15, 2013, that reached number one on Hot Latin Songs — and brought a further Latin Grammy nomination, this time for Best Contemporary Tropical Album.^[11] Two years later, Double Vision marked his most deliberate crossover, the first album he sang primarily in English; its singles "Stuck on a Feeling," a 2014 track with Snoop Dogg that became his best-performing United States single at number 43 on the Hot 100, and "Back It Up," a 2015 collaboration with Jennifer Lopez and Pitbull, both reached the chart.^[12] In 2017, Five returned him to the top of the Top Latin Albums chart for a fourth time; its single "Déjà Vu," a duet with Shakira also featured on her album El Dorado, became his most commercially successful — later certified ninefold platinum in the Latin field by the Recording Industry Association of America — and found a second life in 2023 as a viral hit on TikTok.^[13]