Jun 23, 2026 · 14 min · 6 segments
Welcome To The Real Oshow, 0:00 Intro 1:00 Breaking Down Rod Wave Don’t Look Down Trailer 3:45 Drake Sells OVO to Authentic Brands Group 7:40 Strauss Zelnick Talks Biggest Risks With GTA 6…
No entities detected.
Rod Wave just announced a new project, Don't Look Down, coming out in August.
But the best part of the whole thing is he's 100% taken out of Drake's Iceman playbook by promoting the project far out.
He continues to talk about cutting out the middleman, which he already did with touring, where the last one, The Redemption Experience, was his mainstay touring company.
Now what's to come before or after Don't Look Down? There's a lot of tension around Rod Wave going on right now because he's one of the biggest artists in rap.
And now you got Drake going against the label, Kodak's out of his deal.
Now Rod Wave looks like the next domino to fall.
And the industry is definitely looking for something to get Rod Wave back under control because when you cut out touring, you cut out the label, you cut out distribution.
something bad is probably going to happen.
I think the music industry is at a crossroads where once you get big enough, you no longer need labels.
This happened a long time ago and Lucian Grange literally separated church from state where he literally made labels different from distribution because there was a way where labels were going to die.
So Lucian kind of saved labels in that sense.
But just to give more context to Rod Wave's deal, he came out and said just from his merch alone, he was making only $200,000 a year.
And since he's went independent, he's now made $14 million in a single year just from merch.
That just shows the scale of if you are big enough, being independent is actually a better thing than having a label that's going to take way more than half your shit.
If
he was only getting paid $200,000
a year for merch, that is horribly low.
Like that's like three, 4%.
Well, we've talked about this before.
Not every artist can go independent.
Now, if you have the structure and the work ethic and you start to see how the sausage is made, which is what Rod Wave's done.
You see Drake doing it at the biggest scale.
Taylor Swift has done it.
Once you become a superstar, it's why Russ has always said like, oh, they would never let Drake go independent.
He would kill the music industry.
Rod Wave just announced a new project, Don't Look Down, coming out in August.
But the best part of the whole thing is he's 100% taken out of Drake's Iceman playbook by promoting the project far out.
He continues to talk about cutting out the middleman, which he already did with touring, where the last one, The Redemption Experience, was his mainstay touring company.
Now what's to come before or after Don't Look Down? There's a lot of tension around Rod Wave going on right now because he's one of the biggest artists in rap.
And now you got Drake going against the label, Kodak's out of his deal.
Now Rod Wave looks like the next domino to fall.
And the industry is definitely looking for something to get Rod Wave back under control because when you cut out touring, you cut out the label, you cut out distribution.
something bad is probably going to happen.
I think the music industry is at a crossroads where once you get big enough, you no longer need labels.
This happened a long time ago and Lucian Grange literally separated church from state where he literally made labels different from distribution because there was a way where labels were going to die.
So Lucian kind of saved labels in that sense.
But just to give more context to Rod Wave's deal, he came out and said just from his merch alone, he was making only $200,000 a year.
And since he's went independent, he's now made $14 million in a single year just from merch.
That just shows the scale of if you are big enough, being independent is actually a better thing than having a label that's going to take way more than half your shit.
If
he was only getting paid $200,000
a year for merch, that is horribly low.
Like that's like three, 4%.
Well, we've talked about this before.
Not every artist can go independent.
Now, if you have the structure and the work ethic and you start to see how the sausage is made, which is what Rod Wave's done.
You see Drake doing it at the biggest scale.
Taylor Swift has done it.
Once you become a superstar, it's why Russ has always said like, oh, they would never let Drake go independent.
He would kill the music industry.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.