The FMS World Series
Tens of millions of social media followers. Thousands of tickets sold per event. Billions of digital impressions each year.
Freestyle rap—deeply rooted in the Bronx’s 1970s hip-hop movement, where DJ Kool Herc’s breakbeats laid the foundation for MCs to hype up crowds and trade rhymes—has evolved into a structured, highly competitive, highly lucrative global industry. What began as spontaneous lyrical exchanges in the streets has transformed into an arena-filling spectacle, drawing major sponsorships and millions of viewers worldwide.
Video: a rap battle with 32 million views.
Interestingly, freestyle rap battles are following the blueprint of other underground scenes that grew into massive entertainment businesses—most notably esports and mixed martial arts (MMA).
- Once dismissed as a niche subculture, esports now boast a market worth more than $1.8 billion with hundreds of millions of fans worldwide. Like freestyle, it thrives on digital-first audiences, global live streaming and intense fan engagement. Both industries have secured major sponsorships from non-traditional brands eager to reach young, highly engaged audiences.
- The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) was once an underground, unsanctioned spectacle before structured leagues, standardized rules and strategic branding turned it into a multi-billion-dollar empire. The rise of professional freestyle rap mirrors this transformation—what was once an informal, unregulated art form has now evolved into a competitive sport with rankings, structured events and league formats.
Much like esports and MMA before it, freestyle rap is proving its ability to command massive audiences and corporate sponsorships—and with continued expansion into new markets, it may be on the verge of a breakthrough as a mainstream entertainment powerhouse.
While Urban Roosters’ Freestyle Master Series (FMS) has set the gold standard for structured freestyle, it’s not the only major player in the space:
- Red Bull Batalla: A global tournament that serves as a launchpad for emerging rap battle talent, crowning champions across Spanish-speaking countries and the U.S.
- Liga Bazooka: A platform focused on written-rap battles, blending traditional hip-hop storytelling with freestyle’s competitive edge.
Video: a rap battle with 64 million views.
Together, these organizations have helped rap battles evolve into a multi-layered competitive scene, one that continues to attract brands, fans and corporate investment.
But what makes rap battles so commercially viable?
- Rap battle content dominates YouTube, with individual battles accumulating tens of millions of views. The Urban Roosters YouTube channel has nearly 1.6 billion views, while Red Bull Batalla’s channel surpasses 1.8 billion.
- FMS regularly sells out 5,000+ seat venues, with top battles drawing hundreds of thousands of concurrent online viewers. Its biggest events have packed stadiums of 15,000+ spectators.
- Companies like Pepsi, Red Bull and JD Sports have already backed rap battles, betting on its rising commercial appeal.
- Unlike traditional sports leagues, FMS allows its competitors to secure their own individual sponsorships, increasing their personal revenue while simultaneously bringing more brands into the rap battle ecosystem. Many of these sponsors, initially drawn to individual MCs, later expand their involvement by partnering with Urban Roosters itself.
- Urban Roosters alone commands over 30 million followers across platforms—by far the largest freestyle rap league digital footprint.
This combination of viral content, live entertainment and high engagement has transformed rap battles into an increasingly attractive business opportunity. Now, its expanding commercial ecosystem is making space for unexpected players, including one of the fastest-growing industries looking for new sponsorship opportunities: cannabis.
Urban Roosters’ Roots And The Professionalization Of Freestyle Rap
Urban Roosters was founded to bring structure to a movement that, at first, lacked clear rules and direction. In the mid-2010s, Asier Fernández and Pedro Henrique realized that improvisational rap could become a competitive sport—provided there were leagues, regulations and a sustainable business model. That concept sparked the FMS, the first professional freestyle rap league in Spanish.
In the early days, the company relied almost exclusively on ticket sales. Up until 2019, 85% of its revenue came from ticketing. But in 2020, the pandemic forced a halt to live events, prompting a rethink of the entire strategy. “We had no choice but to adapt and look for new revenue streams,” Fernández explains.
That turning point led to a complete diversification. Today, ticketing makes up just 30% of the company’s revenue, with the remainder coming from sponsorships, digital monetization and talent management. “Right now, sponsorship revenue already matches our ticketing income and keeps growing,” he adds.
This shift allowed Urban Roosters to quintuple its revenue since 2020–or triple it if compared to the pre-pandemic numbers of 2019. While the company has not disclosed its current revenue, an estimate—based on information shared back in 2020—suggests it now generates between €6 million and €7 million (approximately $6.4 to $7.4 million) annually.
Such results quickly attracted investors. In 2020, the company closed a pre-Series A with what Fernández calls “business angels” and smaller-scale funds; by 2022, it had raised a Series A with specialized venture capital. However, the influx of capital came with conditions: a new CEO, corporate director and revenue director—all with mainstream business experience working with companies like FC Barcelona—were brought on board. By 2024, those executives had departed, leaving Fernández and Henrique back at the helm.
“85% of our shareholders voted for us to take over again,” Fernández points out.
Since then, Urban Roosters has maintained steady growth, having raised roughly €8 million in private investment. Among its shareholders are Andrew Croker and John Gleasure, both part of the founding team at DAZN, as well as Manel Arroyo (and family) from Dorna, the creators of MotoGP. Didac Lee, a former FC Barcelona executive who spearheaded the club’s digital transformation, is also a key backer. JME Ventures, a Spanish VC fund active in entertainment-focused startups, contributed as well. Even during the 2020 crisis, DAZN, MotoGP and Didac Lee himself reinforced their commitment. Today, Urban Roosters views the United States as its next major frontier.
Freestyle’s Next Frontiers: Brazil, The U.S. And Breaking Into The Mainstream
With FMS leagues firmly established across Latin America—including Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and Chile—as well as Spain, Urban Roosters continues its rapid expansion. The 2024 season featured more than 70 events, including the Caribbean circuit and FMS Internacional, where elite freestylers battled for global titles. As the competitive freestyle rap scene cements itself in mainstream entertainment, major brands are tapping into its massive reach to engage younger, highly digital audiences.
Each new market, however, comes with its own set of challenges—something Urban Roosters experienced firsthand in Brazil. With a population of 216 million and a recorded music industry that surged 21% year-over-year in the first half of 2024, reaching R$1.44 billion (around $256.4 million per semester or more than $500 million per years), the country represented both immense potential and structural complexities. Unlike other FMS leagues, freestyle battles in Brazil traditionally followed a “round by round” judging system rather than evaluating full head-to-head performances. However, Urban Roosters introduced its own structured competition format, which has since become the standard across the country, Fernández assures, successfully positioning FMS Brazil as one of the region’s most competitive circuits.
Rap battles’ commercial growth hasn’t just attracted traditional corporate sponsors. In recent years, alternative industries—including cannabis—have begun recognizing the format’s engagement potential. Rolling paper and cultivation brands have joined the FMS as sponsors, marking a significant shift from rap battles’ earlier reluctance to embrace such partnerships.
Yet the company’s ambitions extend far beyond Latin America.
The United States: The Last Big Stage
The U.S. media and entertainment industry, valued at $649 billion as of 2024 and projected to grow to $808 billion by 2028, has yet to fully embrace commercial rap battles, despite rap’s dominance on music charts and hip-hop’s deep cultural influence across American society.
“We know a strong debut in the U.S. would be a huge catalyst for our business,” Fernández acknowledges. “But we’re also aware it’s a hyper-competitive market, with high costs and major entry barriers.”
“Brazil not only represented a key market due to its size and growth in the music industry, but also served as a dress rehearsal for future expansion into the U.S., facing similar challenges such as cultural adaptation and penetration into a highly competitive entertainment ecosystem,” he adds.
To mitigate risks, Urban Roosters plans to first establish an FMS in Spanish, targeting the roughly 40 million U.S. Spanish speakers before eventually launching an English-language league.
The commercial viability of rap battles is further validated by its surging digital engagement. In February 2024, the FMS Internacional Final recorded 497,000 concurrent viewers across platforms, demonstrating an audience that rivals some traditional sports broadcasts. While it hasn’t yet reached the scale of mainstream American leagues, it’s already attracting top-tier sponsors.
Asier Fernández at the FMS World Series
“Every big sponsor we bring on paves the way for the next one,” Fernández says. “When JD Sports took a chance on us in 2018, it proved we were a serious proposition. Now, with deals alongside Pepsi and Red Bull, landing new brands is much easier.”
Yet one of rap battles’ most unexpected evolutions isn’t its partnerships with corporate giants—it’s the growing embrace of the cannabis industry.
The U.S. Battle Rap Scene: A Different Path With Emerging Parallels
While Urban Roosters continues expanding into new markets, freestyle rap’s trajectory in North America has followed a markedly different path. Unlike the structured, league-based format that has propelled the Spanish-speaking freestyle rap world into mainstream entertainment, battle rap in the U.S. and Canada remains largely event-driven, with a more underground and decentralized nature.
Two of the region’s most established leagues, Ultimate Rap League (URL) and King of the Dot (KOTD), have built massive followings, drawing millions of views online and consistently filling venues for live events. URL, widely regarded as the gold standard of battle rap, has partnered with major platforms like Caffeine, which has invested heavily in bringing battle rap to a wider streaming audience. Meanwhile, KOTD has expanded internationally through its World Domination series, attracting MCs from different continents and helping to globalize battle rap’s appeal.
Unlike FMS, where MCs compete in a season-long structure with official rankings, contracts and standardized league-wide judging criteria, URL and KOTD operate on an event-by-event basis, with battles judged individually rather than contributing to a cumulative leaderboard. While this format preserves battle rap’s raw, unpredictable nature, it has also made commercialization more fragmented, with fewer long-term brand partnerships compared to Urban Roosters' structured model.
Still, both scenes are seeing increased interest from alternative sponsors—including the cannabis industry.
In Canada, KOTD founder Travis “Organik” Fleetwood co-founded Ghost Drops, a well-known cannabis brand, further solidifying the intersection of battle rap culture and the legal cannabis industry. While explicit cannabis sponsorships in URL remain less documented, battle rap events in North America have frequently aligned with lifestyle and cannabis-adjacent brands, reflecting freestyle rap’s long-standing cultural ties to the plant.
As rap battles continue to globalize, Urban Roosters’ expansion into the U.S. represents a major test case: Can a structured, league-style format gain traction in a market where rap battles have traditionally been independent, one-off events? If successful, Urban Roosters could introduce an entirely new model to North America—one that blends competitive structure with the sponsorship and commercialization opportunities already emerging in the scene.
In that sense, Urban Roosters’ entry into the U.S. isn’t just about expansion—it’s about reinventing the way freestyle rap is packaged, monetized and presented to a mainstream audience.
Cannabis And Freestyle Rap: A Once-Taboo Connection Goes Corporate
While freestyle rap has long referenced cannabis culture in lyrics, it wasn’t until recently—when rolling paper and cannabis cultivation brands entered the space—that this relationship became a formal business opportunity. Any deeper institutional ties were off-limits, as Urban Roosters remained cautious of alienating mainstream advertisers. But as legalization efforts accelerated and public perception shifted, the rap battle industry found itself at the intersection of two rapidly growing markets.
“Our priority was proving freestyle rap was a serious commercial product for large multinationals,” says Fernández. But things have changed.
The first tangible bridge between the two industries came through BSF Arena, a project that seamlessly blended freestyle battles with cannabis culture under the patronage of BSF Seeds. Unlike previous one-off references, this was an intentional crossover—an event where cannabis brands could engage freestyle rap fans directly, without the traditional industry stigma. And it worked. Rather than repelling mainstream sponsors, BSF Arena demonstrated that cannabis brands could coexist within the freestyle rap ecosystem without controversy.
Buoyed by this success, Urban Roosters took a decisive step forward. In the latest FMS World Series event, major cannabis-related brands like OCB (rolling papers) and Canna (cannabis grow supplies, nutrients and fertilizers) officially joined as full-fledged sponsors, marking the most visible endorsement of cannabis culture in professional freestyle rap to date.
“We’ve had zero negative reactions from adding cannabis-sector sponsors,” Fernández states. “The perception of freestyle rap has changed radically and the same has happened with cannabis.”
Why Cannabis Brands Are Turning To Rap Battles For Sponsorships
Despite the expanding legalization of cannabis, the industry faces significant hurdles in mainstream advertising. Platforms like Google, Meta (Facebook & Instagram) and YouTube enforce strict policies against promoting cannabis-related products, making it difficult for brands to reach their audiences through traditional digital marketing.
Even on major television broadcasts, cannabis brands continue to be rejected. The Super Bowl, the most-watched TV event in the U.S., has repeatedly turned down cannabis-related commercials. In 2019, CBS declined to air a medical marijuana ad from Acreage Holdings during Super Bowl LIII, despite growing public support for legalization. Similarly, in 2022, NBC rejected a Weedmaps commercial for Super Bowl LVI.
These advertising restrictions have pushed cannabis companies to seek alternative platforms—from live events to emerging digital spaces where regulations are more flexible. In Latin America and Spain, cannabis sponsorships have already made their way into soccer clubs, music festivals and online media platforms.
For freestyle rap, this shift is an opportunity. The combination of high engagement, young demographics and digital-first audiences makes leagues like FMS an attractive option for cannabis brands that can’t access traditional marketing channels.
Far from deterring its existing investors, this evolution has cemented freestyle rap’s position as an innovation hub, one where unexpected industries converge. As Urban Roosters eyes further expansion, both in Latin America and the United States, it continues to establish itself not just as a global entertainment powerhouse, but as a business platform capable of accommodating any sector eager to reach a new generation of consumers.
“Freestyle rap and cannabis have matured at the same pace. What was once seen as a niche market is now mainstream, and that’s why this collaboration makes sense today,” Fernández concludes.
