WWE is coming to Rolling Loud.
Tonight’s edition of Friday Night SmackDown emanates from Cleveland, Ohio but the SmackDown Women’s Championship match between champion Bianca Belair and challenger Carmella will take place from the popular music festival in Miami, Florida.
Ahead of the historic event, Rolling Loud co-founder Tariq Cherif spoke with Complex about their partnership with WWE.
“A lot of people on this team grew up fans of wrestling, and we love and respect what the WWE has built as far as their storylines and their brand and the way they’ve gotten this massive legion of diehard fans. They go to WrestleMania every year, and we’re building something similar over here. Granted, it’s different, but we have a lot of similarities, and we also have a lot of crossover fans. There’s a lot of hip-hop fans that are fans of wrestling. There’s a lot of wrestling fans who are fans of hip-hop. Hip-hop dominates all culture.
It’s the No. 1 genre of music. It drives culture across all press points, from music to fashion to athletics to tech to charities. It doesn’t matter where you are, hip-hop has a major presence. So we have a lot of crossover fans thanks to hip-hop being so massive, and thanks to wrestling being so massive. We just thought it would be cool to mesh both worlds together and bring them into our world, expose them to our fans at the festival and on our stream. And we’ll be in turn exposed to their fans that tune into Fox on Friday night to watch SmackDown. It’ll be pretty cool.”
Related: SmackDown To Be Held At Rolling Loud Music Festival For Split-Site Show On July 23
