Gabe P Turned a Borrowed Room Into Rap's Discovery Engine

By Cole Ashby, October 26, 2026

In the summer of 2018, Gabe P started out in a small, borrowed room. By his own account to Complex, he had sketched a design in a journal, and a graphic designer turned it into a logo. He wanted very little: "Just a space to do one interview a week." He called it On the Radar.

Eight years later, the official On the Radar YouTube channel shows 1.87 million subscribers in October 2026. The show has put a Drake record on the Billboard Hot 100, runs a label that Rolling Stone reported distributes its own releases, and earned its founder, born Gabriel Pabon, a place on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Music list for 2025. Its crew now films in a Williamsburg building that Brooklyn Magazine describes as glowing with "the brand's signature lime green hue."

What Gabe P built works as a media outlet, an A&R department and a record label at once, and in 2026 he is pointing it at the rest of the world. From the side room to the label, Gabe P and his team tend to get to artists early.

A radio kid from Long Island

The story that Gabe P has told across several interviews starts at home. Billboard reports that he grew up "in a traditional Puerto Rican household" on Long Island, surrounded by salsa and reggaeton, and was raised by a father Billboard calls a "rock head" from The Bronx. Brooklyn Magazine adds that the household was strict and went without cable until he was around nine, and that 106 & Park, Rap City, MTV Jams and Hot 97 on car rides with his aunt shaped his ear.

One of the first albums he bought, he told Billboard, was Jay-Z and Linkin Park's Collision Course, and he draws a straight line from that record to the show. Watching the rise of drill and everything around it, he says he decided, "Nah, somebody's gotta give these artists a fair shot."

At St. John's University in Queens, Billboard reports, he worked at the campus station WSJU "as programming director, producer and on-air personality." Brooklyn Magazine says he joined the station in his first week. The turn came when the school picked him and classmate Nyla Symone to interview Angie Martinez during the run for her memoir. Martinez brought both of them to Power 105.1 as interns, according to Brooklyn Magazine; Billboard says Power later hired him as a digital content manager.

Martinez is the name he returns to most. "I came up under Angie Martinez and I feel like, I don't really need to say more than that," he told Rolling Stone in 2023. In Brooklyn Magazine this year, he framed her as a kind of conscience for the whole operation: "I don't want to think about the phone call I would get from Angie Martinez."

The side room

The early show was small by design. Gabe P told Complex he interviewed one or two artists a week through 2018 and 2019. Rolling Stone's account, from its 2023 list of rap innovators, has him recording his own interviews with local New York rappers like Cash Cobain and Kay Flock.

The motive, as he explained it to Complex, was a gap he saw in rap media during the SoundCloud years: "Bro, nobody here is representing for the young kids." He gave Dazed a fuller version in 2025. "On the Radar was never even on the radio, it just kind of started from my love of radio and the fact that radio was once a place where everyone would go to discover new music," he said. He calls the early room a "closet." Hell's Kitchen rapper Marlon Craft told Brooklyn Magazine he was one of the very first guests.

Then the pandemic pushed the show onto Zoom. Complex reports that the shift slowed things down but left Gabe P with relationships he could use once rooms reopened. When they did, singer and producer Devvon Terrell helped him move into a shared studio in Brooklyn, Complex and Billboard report. Gabe P described the setup to Mixtape Madness in 2025 with no romance at all: "We had a raggedy set up with one mic and a laptop but we ended up blowing up during the Bronx drill era."

The drill years

The freestyle series took shape in July 2021. Gabe P told Complex he brought five artists into the studio in a single hour and called it "The Starting Five: On The Radar Freestyle Session." Eventually, he says, Nas EBK delivered "the first real viral freestyle."

What followed is the stretch most fans associate with the brand. Gabe P has claimed a direct hand in several of the era's early moments. "I found [Bronx drill rapper] Kay Flock, I did Kay Flock's first interview," he told Rolling Stone. Gabe P told Complex the joint interview with Kay Flock, B-Lovee and Dougie B was "very important because that was when the Bronx drill era was just starting to get poppin." He told the outlet the DThang freestyle was a moment that "put OTR on the map."

Cash Cobain was one of the first three artists filmed in the main On the Radar room, Gabe P told Complex. When Gabe picked his favorite freestyles for Dazed, the Cash Cobain and Chow Lee session came first. "Cash and Chow creating sexy drill, alongside Lonny Love, have had long-lasting impacts on music," he said. Cobain returned the credit in Billboard: "Gabe saw it when a lot of people didn't, honestly when the world didn't."

The Cash Cobain & Chow Lee Freestyle, On The Radar Radio

Drill also carried the show across the Atlantic. "Drill music helped bring the show internationally," Gabe P told Billboard. In his telling to Complex, Digga D's appearance made UK audiences pay attention, and AJ Tracey reached out right after.

The weekend everything moved

Ask Gabe P to name an inflection point and he picks a weekend in May 2022, when On the Radar released its Ice Spice and AJ Tracey clips. "That little weekend right there was the [epitome] of On The Radar," he told Brooklyn Magazine.

The Ice Spice session became one of the show's most durable artifacts. Billboard notes that she later included her freestyle from the show, recorded in May 2022, on the deluxe version of her EP Like..?. The team does not undersell its role. Asked about the platform's track record in 2023, operations head John Nurse and Gabe P both told Rolling Stone the same thing in back-to-back lines: "Literally broke Ice Spice."

The Ice Spice "On The Radar" Freestyle, On The Radar Radio

Ice Spice: The Ice Spice "On The Radar" Freestyle

That weekend also put the show in front of its biggest future guest. Brooklyn Magazine reports that Drake liked the AJ Tracey clip on Instagram, then unliked it after Gabe P posted a screenshot. Gabe P took it as a sign he had Drake's attention.

Drake, and the day after

About a year later, according to Brooklyn Magazine, Drake sent Gabe P a direct message asking to come on the show with Central Cee. They recorded during Drake's New York stop on the It's All a Blur tour, and the video arrived on July 21, 2023, Billboard reported.

The Drake & Central Cee "On The Radar" Freestyle, On The Radar Radio

The release, "On The Radar Freestyle," debuted at No. 80 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart dated Aug. 12, 2023, and at No. 33 on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, Billboard reported. It was Central Cee's first Hot 100 entry, and Billboard noted that it was the first track from the show to appear on any Billboard chart.

Drake and Central Cee: On The Radar Freestyle

Gabe P has talked about the moment two ways. To Billboard in 2024 he sounded proud: "I can forever say that I have a song within Drake's catalog." To Rolling Stone in the fall of 2023, he sounded restless: "Drake was just a stepping stone." Brooklyn Magazine captured the same impulse from the day after the shoot: "After we did [the] Drake [freestyle], the next day, I literally said, 'Okay, cool. We're putting out Drake next week. What do we do after that?'"

In his Rolling Stone innovators entry, he made a point about independence that explains a lot of what came next: "And I did it by myself with my team."

The label and the spiderweb

In October 2023, Rolling Stone described a small staff led by Gabe P with Sony Music alum John Nurse running operations and writer Tobbylola handling artist relations. By April 2026, Brooklyn Magazine counted a 15-person operation; showrunner Calvin Schneider told the magazine the team does about 100 shoots a month, and the magazine reports that the group sorts through 50 to 100 artist recommendations a day in a shared Slack channel. Brooklyn Magazine now identifies Nurse as co-CEO.

On the Radar Records grew out of the freestyles. Gabe P credited Charlie Sloth and Fire in the Booth as an inspiration for putting freestyles on streaming services, and he told Rolling Stone the label's goal for 2023 was 300 records on streaming. "The most music we ever dropped on a Friday was 14 singles," he said. Nurse explained the setup in one line: "The thing is we distribute through ourselves." Gabe P also described a revenue model that pays the whole crew: "Everybody on my team gets to eat off of whatever we make for the rest of our lives off the music."

The label also stretched into live EPs, Gabe P told Rolling Stone, starting with wolfacejoeyy, who he said had "blown up off our platform twice."

Gabe P describes the curation as real work, not a pay-to-play booth. Billboard reports that he calls it "real A&R work" and that he pushes back on the idea that any artist can buy a slot. His metaphor for the reach is a web. "I look at On the Radar like a spiderweb," he told Billboard. "I'm always trying to keep growing my web and reach within different sounds in hip-hop."

The web keeps widening. Billboard reported the first Italian On the Radar freestyle, with Rondo, in June 2024. Dazed recorded Gabe P's account of Laila! opening "the door for R&B," of YOVNGCHIMI's video opening doors in Latin music, and of a country performance by Anella Herim that led the team to Nashville. 1900Rugrat and Atlanta's Karrahbooo are among the newer names Mixtape Madness credits to the show's run of viral moments.

Taking it on the road

The 2025 and 2026 chapters are about geography. Mixtape Madness caught up with Gabe P in West London in July 2025, during what the outlet described as On the Radar's second international expansion, after its OTR Brazil series. He was already naming the next stops. "France and Germany are next," he said, adding Spain, Japan, China, South Korea and Latin America to the long list.

When Brooklyn Magazine spoke with him for its April 2026 story, he was days away from Puerto Rico to film the On the Radar Latin Takeover, and he laid out the model plainly: "So every time we go to a new region, we do originals. We do 75 to 120 artists." The aim, he said, was to help those artists "live in a more mainstream lane, using us as a bridge."

At home, the show has kept pushing in two directions at once. Its Raps New Class Cypher (Vol. 1), shot with ten lyricists over a beat made by rapper and producer Ovrkast, ran in early 2026; Brooklyn Magazine reports Gabe P built it after reading comments from viewers who "wanted a real lyricist cipher." Chris Patrick was one of the ten, and On the Radar posted his verse as a standalone clip. Two weeks after the cipher shoot, the Williamsburg studio hosted De La Soul with Black Thought and DJ Premier.

On The Radar Raps New Class Cypher (VOL 1.), On The Radar Radio

What he is building now

Expansion has its critics, and Gabe P does not pretend otherwise. Brooklyn Magazine reports that some moves drew oversaturation complaints, and that he called the push into country, K-pop and rock "trial and error." His defense is about patience: "But I think expansion is also getting an audience used to seeing new things."

He has also been careful about what kind of outlet On the Radar is. Brooklyn Magazine reports that he held the De La Soul videos until the group approved them, and he described the goal in terms that echo his mentor: "I want to create a space for artists where they feel like it's a neutral ground."

The next phase, as he described it to Brooklyn Magazine, includes a terrestrial On the Radar Radio show and original music beyond reissued performances. "I want to make my compilation tape. I want to bring people together," he said. To Dazed, he put the end goal in one sentence: "Today, the goal is for OTR to be the go-to destination for music discovery."

The ambition is not new. "The mission has never changed," he told Billboard in 2024. "I want to be the biggest and I want to be the best." What has changed is the evidence. A show that started with one interview a week in a small, borrowed room now films around 100 sessions a month, has charted a Drake record, runs its own label and is taking its freestyle series region by region. The open question is whether a discovery engine built in New York can keep finding artists early in places where it is the newcomer. On the record so far, Gabe P has kept being early.