Saturday, April 4, 7 p.m. on TV8. The RDS Showcase delivers an unforgettable live show with one of the world’s most beloved Italian artists.
Live music returns to center stage and does so with a project that combines entertainment, television and lifestyle storytelling. RDS Showcase restarts from the Multimedia Auditorium of RDS 100% Greatest Hits and chooses Tiziano Ferro as the opening star, with a live event that airs on TV8 on Saturday, April 4 at 7 p.m. An appointment that marks the return of a formula capable of transforming radio into an immersive experience, between sound, images and audience.
RDS SHOWCASE is the format that better than any other knows how to tell what it means to meet an artist for real, without the screen of a seventy-thousand-seat stadium, without the distance that separates the stalls from the stage when there are two hundred thousand of them under the open sky. Here the audience – carefully selected from loyal radio listeners – is only a few meters away from the artist. He hears him breathe. He hears him building every note in the air. It is a rare, almost artisanal dimension that in the world of mass music is worth its weight in gold.
RDS AUDITORIUM: THE STAGE THAT CHANGES THE RULES
Behind this event is a radio station that has not been just a radio station for almost fifty years. RDS 100% Grandi Successi is today the most listened-tomultiplatform entertainment company in Italy, with more than 6 million average daily listeners and a history that has been able to go through every technological revolution without ever losing the thread with its audience. From FM frequencies to digital, from TV to the web, RDS has built over time an ecosystem capable of offering quality content in every format, on every screen, at any time of day.
The RDS Showcase is one of the finest fruits of this vision. Three special events, three live shows made in the Multimedia Auditorium, three evenings that bring great live music to an exclusive yet intimate setting. After Tiziano Ferro on April 4, the stage will welcome Blanco on April 12 (7:15 p.m. on TV8) and Laura Pausini on April 18 (6:30 p.m. on TV8)-a trifecta of names that alone says it all about RDS’s ability to dialogue with the best of contemporary Italian music.
Leading these moments is Roberta Lanfranchi, the iconic voice of the broadcaster who knows how to turn an interview into a real conversation and a performance into a shared memory. The full live broadcasts will be available on demand at rds.co.uk, on the RDS app, on RDS Social TV (digital terrestrial channel 265) and on the official YouTube channel. The promotional campaign covers radio and TV spots, print, digital, and out-of-home billboards in 11 Italian cities.
TIZIANO FERRO: THE KING OF THE STAGE RETURNS HOME
But this April evening does not belong only to RDS. Above all, it belongs to him, to the man born in Latina on February 21, 1980 who has sold over twenty million records worldwide, who sings in five languages, who is a voting member of the Grammy Award jury, and who after every departure always, punctually, finds his way home. That home is called Italy, and every time Tiziano Ferro calculates it, he re-enters it with the strength of someone who has never stopped truly belonging to it.
His 2026 began with a bang, in the most literal and glamorous sense of the word: February on the stage of the Sanremo Festival to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Xdono, the single that in 2002 took third place on the top-selling singles chart in Europe and launched a small-town boy into the Olympus of international music. On that occasion he presented for the first time live the title track of his latest album, Sono un grande, in front of an entire Italy that remembered why this artist never gets tired: because every time he sings he says something necessary.
SUPERSTAR: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP BECOME A SONG
And then, a few days after the Showcase on TV8, came the news that no one expected but that everyone, after all, had been waiting for all along. As of Friday, April 3, SUPERSTAR, the first unreleased collaboration in history between Tiziano Ferro and Giorgia – two voices, two careers, twenty-five years of genuine friendship that finally find their most accomplished musical form – is available in all digital stores and in radio rotation.
The song was born in an almost cinematic way, with that unintentional poetry that belongs only to real things. Voice and text messages sent at night, crossing different time zones – Ferro often abroad, Giorgia in Rome – sincere conversations about life, music, fragility and the need to be well. Out of those conversations came a verse and an aside, which Titian sent to Giorgia expecting a response. What came exceeded all expectations.
“Words that devastated me,” Ferro says, “because I realized that she had taken my provocation and taken it five levels further, going even deeper.
Giorgia restores to the song a universal reading, greater than music itself: “Superstar can be anyone, you don’t need to have a particular job. Being a superstar lies in emotions and affections. It is someone who gives and does not always receive in return.”
A song about the ups and downs of show business, the big hits and the dark moments, the need to know who you are beyond the stage, the applause, the fame. A lyric that sounds cryptic but is, in fact, the most direct Ferro has ever written. Produced from the Los Angeles auditions with Marco Sonzini to the final track entrusted to Zef-the same team behind Cuore Rotto, Fingo & Spingo, and Sono un grande-the result is a song that sounds exactly how the meeting of two giants should sound.
“I AM A GREAT (DELUXE)”: A BOX SET THAT OPENS LAYER BY LAYER
SUPERSTAR is more than just a single: it is the key takeaway from “SONO UN GRANDE (DELUXE),” the expanded edition of Tiziano Ferro’s album due out May 22. The original tracks released last fall are joined by 7 new songs, including 5 previously unreleased and unexpected collaborations that promise to once again redraw the boundaries of what Ferro is capable of. The record is already on preorder – in CD format with poster and in an autographed version exclusively for Sugar Music – for those who want to be among the first to hold it in their hands and feel the physical weight of a record designed as an object of desire.
STADIUMS 26: FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND TICKETS AND A LEGENDARY SUMMER
However, if you really want to understand what kind of year Tiziano Ferro is having, one number is enough: 400,000 tickets sold for STADI 26, the tour produced and organized by Live Nation that starting next May will take him through Italy’s twelve most iconic stadiums. A figure that speaks for itself and tells better than any market analysis the position that this artist occupies in the Italian collective imagination.
It starts on May 30 from Lignano (Teghil Stadium), then two nights at San Siro on June 6 and 7, Turin on June 10, Bologna on June 14, Padua on June 18, Naples on June 23, Rome at the Olimpico on June 27 and 28-two nights already destined for legend-and again Ancona on July 3, Bari on July 8 and Messina on July 12.
RDS proves once again why nearly fifty years of history is built not only with frequencies but with the ability to understand what the listener really wants: true emotion, authentic quality, the irreplaceable thrill of great live music.
