Rolling Loud was founded by two childhood friends, Matt Zingler and Tariq Cherif. One of the owners during a recent livestream with Adin Ross revealed that they send Drake 5-10 million dollar deals for him to perform at the Rolling Loud festival. However, the popular artist has declined every single time."I send a offer to Drake every year, max offer, millions of dollars (but he declines). We sent him our back offers. Millions of dollars. "This is not the first time Rolling Loud has addressed Drake turning down their offers. During a January 2025 interview with Big Boy, co-founder Tariq Cherif admitted,"I feel like Drake's ducking us. I have no issue with him. I think he's incredible, but we've been trying to book him forever. We even offered him three nights as the sole headliner."The festival expanded to Drake's hometown, Toronto, in 2022 and saw performances from Tory Lanez, Lil Uzi Vert, Future, Roddy Ricch, and Pressa. Cheriff, while opening up about their offer, added,"They said, 'Make it special,' so we offered three nights of Drake. Now I hear a festival in Europe might steal our idea."More about Rolling Loud foundersThe Rolling Loud festival began as a small passion project by two friends from Miami, Matt Zingler and Tariq Cheriff. The two met in a Hollywood, Florida, elementary school, and bonded over common interests such as skateboarding and surfing.Before 2015, the two were running small hip-hop shows and club nights in Miami under an events company called Dope Ent., which helped them build connections with artists early in their careers.In 2014-2015, the two decided to fill the gap in music festivals by starting a rap-only festival. Their first festival was in February 2015 in Miami, with the lineup consisting of Travis Scott and Schoolboy Q. By 2016, the two friends scaled up the rap-only festival and featured lineups including Future, Lil Wayne, Kendrick Lamar, Young Thug, among others. By 2017, Rolling Loud had a festival in California and New York, and showed up in Australia and Europe by 2021.In 2021, the festival hosted a post-pandemic festival in Miami in collaboration with WWE, with more than 200,000 attendees. The festival made it to Portugal by July 2022 and Toronto in September 2022.Their California edition was hosted at Inglewood's SoFi Stadium in March 2023. In April 2022, the festival hosted its first edition in Thailand.