Reggaeton

Reggaeton runs at 90-100 BPM in 4/4 over the dembow, a snare-on-the-and pattern derived from Shabba Ranks's 1990 Jamaican dancehall track "Dem Bow." The bass is a sub-heavy 808 that punches on the downbeats; synth pads, plucks, and reggae-derived guitar skanks sit above. Vocals alternate between rapped verses and sung hooks, with prominent Auto-Tune and double-tracked melodic ad-libs. Hooks are short, repeated, and dance-floor first; lyrics deal with desire, partying, neighborhood pride, and increasingly explicit sex. Productions in the 2020s lean drier and more minimal than the maximalist mid-2000s sound.

The genre was built in San Juan, Puerto Rico in the early 1990s by DJs working at marquesina parties and underground tape mixtapes (the "underground" era), splicing Panamanian reggae en español with dancehall and US hip-hop. DJ Playero and DJ Negro's mixtapes through 1995-96 codified the dembow as the genre's spine. A 2002 government anti-obscenity crackdown pushed the scene into commercial label deals, and Daddy Yankee's Barrio Fino (2004), with "Gasolina," turned reggaeton into a mainstream Latin pop form. After a relative trough in the early 2010s, Colombian artists (J Balvin, Maluma) and a second Puerto Rican wave (Bad Bunny, Rauw Alejandro, Anuel AA) made the genre the dominant Spanish-language pop sound, with Bad Bunny topping global streaming charts from 2020 onward.

Listen for the dembow on the snare — "boom-ch-boom-chick" — it doesn't really vary across thousands of tracks, and that's the point. The 808 bass often slides between two notes rather than walking. Notice the producer tag: nearly every reggaeton track opens with a vocal drop from the producer (Tainy, Sky Rompiendo, MAG) that functions like a label imprint. Vocal hooks are usually four bars and repeat at least four times per song.

"Gasolina" by Daddy Yankee (2004) is the genre's mass-market arrival; for the current era, Bad Bunny's "Tití Me Preguntó" (2022) shows how minimal the production has become. The album to put on is Bad Bunny's Un Verano Sin Ti (2022).

Despite the genre's Puerto Rican identity, the foundational rhythm pattern is named after a Jamaican dancehall record, and reggaeton's earliest commercial recordings happened in Panama, not Puerto Rico — making the genre's centerpiece a Caribbean triangulation, not a single national style.