Prince Royce

Prince Royce, the stage name of Geoffrey Royce Rojas, ranks among the artists who carried bachata from its Dominican origins into the mainstream of early twenty-first-century United States Latin pop.^[1] Reference catalogues describe him plainly as an American singer, a label that understates his part in reshaping how a once-rural Dominican guitar music reached bilingual urban audiences.^[2] Born on May 11, 1989, and raised in the Bronx, he belonged to the generation of New York–born children of Dominican migrants for whom bachata served as both ancestral inheritance and contemporary commercial form.^[1] His parents had come from the Dominican Republic, his father working as a taxi driver and his mother in a beauty salon, placing the household firmly within the working-class immigrant Bronx of the period.^[3]

His turn toward music began in childhood, where participation in an elementary-school choir and talent shows preceded an adolescent interest in poetry that, by around the age of thirteen, hardened into songwriting.^[4] As a teenager he recorded alongside a partner known as Jino, the pair performing as a duo before Royce adopted his now-familiar stage name at sixteen.^[4] The decisive stylistic choice arrived amid a slump in reggaeton's commercial fortunes, which led him to concentrate on bachata rather than the urban genre then receding from the Latin market.^[5]

The pivotal professional relationship 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 the young singer to his Top Stop Music label after hearing only a handful of demos.^[6] That partnership produced an eponymous debut studio album, recorded as Royce's first full-length release.^[7] Issued in March 2010, the record yielded two commercially decisive singles, a Spanish-language reworking of "Stand by Me" and "Corazón Sin Cara," both of which reached the summit of the Billboard Tropical Songs chart, while the latter also topped the Hot Latin Songs ranking.^[8]

Industry recognition followed quickly: the debut reached number one on both the Top Latin Albums and Tropical Albums charts, and in 2011 Royce collected three honors at the Billboard Latin Music Awards, among them Tropical Album of the Year.^[9] His second album, Phase II, appeared in 2012 and likewise climbed to number one on the Latin and Tropical album charts, generating 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, followed in 2013 behind the single "Darte un Beso" and brought a further Latin Grammy nomination, this time for Best Contemporary Tropical Album.^[11] Two years later Double Vision marked his most deliberate move toward the Anglophone market, his first record sung primarily in English; its singles "Stuck on a Feeling" (with Snoop Dogg) and "Back It Up" (with Jennifer Lopez and Pitbull) both reached the Billboard Hot 100.^[12] The 2017 release Five returned him to the top of the Top Latin Albums chart for a fourth time, and its single "Déjà Vu," a duet with Shakira, became his most commercially successful, later certified ninefold platinum in the Latin field by the Recording Industry Association of America.^[13]