Peter Rosenberg Says He & Ebro Finished HOT 97 Pay Arbitration

Peter Rosenberg said he and Ebro Darden had just finished arbitration over pay they say HOT 97 owed them. He spoke out as his old morning team backed complaints from the station’s current hosts, Mero and Kaz, on Monday.

On their own show, Rosenberg said Laura Stylez had finished her pay case, too. He did not say how the cases had turned out.

“We just finished arbitration,” he said. “Laura finished hers.”

Ebro said he paid to build the trio’s studio with a plan to give HOT 97 free content it could sell ads against. That work helped them launch quickly after their exit. He also said he had offered to help Mero navigate the job.

Ebro said HOT 97 had stopped paying to test songs with listeners while they still worked there.

The dispute follows the end of “Ebro in the Morning” in December 2025. The show began in 2012 and ran for more than a decade on New York radio. Rosenberg had joined HOT 97 in 2007, while Stylez joined in 2013. Days after their last radio show, they were back as “The Ebro, Laura, Rosenberg Show” on YouTube. The daily stream kept the trio intact while giving them a home beyond the FM dial.

Station owner MediaCo had praised the early gains of “Mornings with Mero.” Its February 23 release put HOT 97 third in New York morning drive among adults ages 25 to 54 and 18 to 49. It said the average quarter-hour audience was up 18.5 percent in the older group and 30.7 percent in the younger one from a year before. The figures came from January’s Nielsen ratings and covered weekday broadcasts from 6 A.M. to 10 A.M. The company tied those gains to “Mornings with Mero.”

That January report does not show how the two shows fared in the past three months. Kaz said his show had beaten The Breakfast Club for three months despite having fewer resources.

Barrett Media reported Monday that the company had yet to respond in public to the hosts’ claims. The hosts did not share the terms of the pay cases on Monday’s show.