Rolling Loud Rolls Large With Global Expansion, Management, Merch, Owen Wilson Film

Tariq Cherif and Matt Zingler were Florida teenagers in high school when they first started throwing parties together at Cherif’s grandma’s house. And look at them now — as adults, their lifestyle brand Rolling Loud has thrown the biggest rap festivals all over the world for a decade. They’ve also been in the club and concert promotion business together for 15 years, and each has a separate artist management company and record label. On the management side, Zingler has worked with artists including Bryson Tiller, Tyga, Xavier Wulf and latest signing, rapper OsamaSon, while Cherif manages acts such as rappers Danny Towers and Ski Mask the Slump God, DJs Scheme and Five Venoms and producer Henry Daher.

The first Rolling Loud took place in Miami in February 2015 and has since expanded in the U.S. in New York and California and internationally to Thailand, Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, India and Australia. The event returns to Sydney on March 7 and Melbourne on March 8.

The festival’s recent India debut took place at Loud Park in Navi Mumbai on Nov. 22-23, attracting a strong 65,000 revelers over two days headlined by UK MC Central Cee, American rappers Wiz Khalifa and Don Toliver and Indian singer and rapper Karan Aujla. (By comparison, Rolling Loud’s 2024 event back in Miami attracted 80,000 per each of three days.) Cherif and Zingler announced onsite that the festival will return to the same venue on Nov. 22-23, 2026, with early bird tickets now on sale.

It’s unusual to know about or buy tickets for a Rolling Loud date so far in advance, an approach that Cherif explains is generally meant to keep the events rare, unmissable and not to be taken for granted. That said, he and Zingler were kind enough to share some fascinating hints about what’s to come in 2026 and beyond in this exclusive interview.

Pollstar: Since you’ve known each other since elementary school, did you bond by going to a lot of shows or festivals together when you were younger? How did you end up working together?
Tariq Cherif: We went to a few shows together, but I don’t think it was really from that. We were part of a friend group in high school, and we used to throw parties at my grandma’s house and at a couple of our other friends’ houses. Most of them were at my grandma’s house, and that was just for fun. Then, when we went to college, I saw that kids our age were booking EDM DJs for nightclubs, and I could tell it was pretty simple: they’re paying the DJ, they’re paying the nightclub and they’re selling the tickets.

I figured I could do that with my favorite rappers at the time. I was into Currensy, Wiz Khalifa, Mac Miller, Kid Cudi, Big Sean — that whole scene back in like 2009, 2010, 2011. So I just remember telling Matt, like, “Yo, we should do this.” And he was like, “Yeah, I’m down.”  We booked Currensy for three shows and just kept going.

So you just had a vision that this was your lane?
Cherif: No — Matt went to a lot more festivals than I did. But at the time, I just wanted to book smaller shows. I had no intention of starting a festival. I just wanted to book shows to get into the music industry and get into management and record label stuff. I didn’t really know at the time what it was, but I just wanted to get my feet wet and see what it turned into. And then just us doing the shows, that business just kept growing and naturally unfolded into us starting our own festival. But I can’t say that at the beginning we had the vision to have a festival. I’ll say one thing though: as soon as we had the vision for the festival, we executed on it within like six months. 

That’s really impressive!
Cherif: It was smaller, though, you know? It was like a 6,000-person show, and it was one day. And a lot of things went wrong, but the most important thing went right, which was that all the fans had a great time and we were able to build on that.

As we speak, you’ve just both gotten back from Rolling Loud India. 
Matt Zingler: Yeah, I’m back in Miami.

You must be exhausted!
Zingler: Nah, I’m an animal!

How did it go? How are you feeling about it?
Zingler: Amazing! It was a great first time in India. I wanted to go to India because the hip-hop community there is under-serviced. There’s not a lot of acts that have been out there before, so it was really impactful for me to put my flag in a country that has like 1.7 billion people in it, you know? Because we’re a lifestyle brand — it’s not just about the event, it’s also what we do after, with media content, film, television and sponsorship activations around merchandising. There’s always a bigger play when Rolling Loud goes to a different place.

Was there anything that happened that you didn’t anticipate?
Cherif: I didn’t know what to expect for the show itself, how the crowd would embrace the music and what they would know and not know. But, man, they loved it and I could tell both in real life by the crowd reactions but also just all the chatter on social media. That has just been super similar to when we did our first show in Miami, so that’s been really great.

Zingler: I was surprised by the turnout: it was 65,000 fans across both days. I was most impressed with the actual turnout itself.

Did you feel like you could really enjoy this weekend, or were you on edge?
Zingler: Oh, I’m pretty calm, cool and collected. I’ve done easily over 50 Rolling Louds at this point of my life, so it’s just like riding a bike to me. If you do it enough, you don’t need training wheels.

Rolling Loud India 2026 is on sale now — isn’t there usually a little bit less lead time for your events being public?
Cherif: It’s not the first time that we’ve done it like this. We don’t always do it, but our partners out there felt like that was a good plan, because the overall sentiment was just so positive… I can argue either way. Sometimes it’s good to have a really long lead time, and sometimes it’s good to be more of a quick strike. So I can’t say which one’s better. They’re just kind of different strategies. 

You’re very open with your age policy — is it important for you to make Rolling Loud accessible to younger people and to be their first major cultural experience?
Zinger: When I was 12, I bought The Slim Shady LP. I bought the Outkast Stankonia album, I bought 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin. I was super into hip-hop and I listened to a lot of music. Around 12-years-old was the time in which I digested a lot of music — even like Limp Bizkit and St. Lunatics and the list goes on and on and on. For me, what I was digesting when I was young  — I was skating. I was outside. When you’re 12, you think you’re a full-blown adult, and kids are advancing so fast online that I do believe that is a proper age to be able to experience something in a safe environment with your friends, with a guardian or with a big brother. I feel like music shouldn’t be limited to age. You should be able to enjoy music really at any age so that’s why I’ve always been bullish on my all-ages policies. We have the ability to create a fun, safe environment and that’s really what it’s about.

How do you account for the amount of energy that is going to happen at a Rolling Loud, whether it’s with mosh pits? Does your team study the pain points of getting too crowded?
Cherif: Well, I’m blessed that we have a great team that specializes in those things. We have a general ethos at Rolling Loud. I get up on the mic and I say it at every show, multiple artists
say it at the shows. It’s like, “Yo, we’re a family out here. If you see someone fall, pick them up.”

It doesn’t matter where we are, Miami, LA, India. Like, I literally did this in India. It’s like a call and response. If you see someone fall and I hold the mic out and the whole crowd says, “You pick them up.” We foster an atmosphere of taking care of each other out here. We’re not ones that are shy to pause the show if the show needs to be paused because somebody got hurt or anything like that. Let’s have a good time, let’s turn up, let’s really have that energy, but we’re a family, we’re a community and we’ve got to take care of each other. It’s just reminding people about that.

You came here with your best friend, you came here with your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your brother, your sister, your mom, your dad, your cousin. Or you came here by yourself and the person to the left, the right of you, in front and back of you, like, that’s your family right now. So get to know each other, take care of each other. And let’s have a great time. That’s the overall ethos.

What else can we look forward to from Rolling Loud in 2026?
Zinger: We have the Rolling Loud film coming out with Owen Wilson, Matt Rife and Travis Scott. It’s an amazing film based on a father bringing his son to Rolling Loud, losing his son at the show and then running around trying to find him. it’s like a Hangover spoof. Jeremy Garelick’s the [writer and] director, and he is one of the directors of The Hangover. It’s an R-rated comedy that’s coming out next year around our Florida show. So that’s something that I’m super excited for merchandising.

You know, we’re in wholesale retail. We just got large orders from Nordstrom and other large accounts across the country and also internationally. So we’re very focused on the merchandising aspect of the brand at the moment in tandem with film and television [projects], working on our documentary films. We’re working on creating a profile and partnerships with select artists for short form content. The future for us is really focused on film, television, merchandising. And that’s what we want to be servicing year-round as well as doing the events and continuing to expand the brand to different countries and places that would enjoy our product.

There isn’t a Rolling Loud in Miami this December, but you told people to get in the gym and get ready to rage at next year’s event. Was there a lot of disappointment that you skipped this year?
Cherif: Definitely a lot of disappointment. People expect us [yearly], but here’s the thing: we had never done the Miami show in December before last year. Miami was always historically in May, and then when we couldn’t do May anymore, we had to switch to July, and then July was just way too hot. We took the risk to try December, and while December was a great show weather-wise, the reality is just a lot of people can’t travel to Miami in December. Their travel budget for the month of December is to go home for the holidays. It becomes a much more local show if people from out of town aren’t as able to fly in, because 10 days later is Christmas, right? So then they’ve got to be home for Christmas. And then college exams ended that Friday that was first day of the show. So December, while it’s ideal on a weather scale, it’s not ideal when you’re a premier destination festival.

We wrestled with, do we go back to December and keep building on December or do we do we move back to somewhere in the May to July range, and that’s what we settled on. We haven’t been super public about it. On the one hand, we used to say we want to be like McDonald’s or Starbucks. You want to be that brand name recognition-wise and as far as what to expect, but I don’t want to be like McDonald’s or Starbucks where you always know that we’re there and if you don’t get us this time you can catch us next time.

Every edition of Rolling Loud is super special to me and I think to all the attendees it’s super special. To an outsider looking in, it might look like this is just different versions of the same thing over and over again and, okay, eventually I’ll catch one, or I can just watch the live stream. We’re blessed, thank God, that we’ve built a brand and a property that people care to return to, but it’s important for people to not take us for granted, you know? Sorry for the wait, but great things take time and when we come back it’s going to be litty.

Are the March shows in Australia the next editions of Rolling Loud?
Cherif: At the moment, at least! Who knows if something pops up?!

Anywhere that you really want to tackle next?
Cherif: Brazil. I’m very interested in South America, specifically Brazil.

ZIngler: In the next 15, 20 years, I want to have a festival in space.