Garth Brooks has officially parted ways with RCA Nashville.

Garth Brooks has parted ways with his record label, but the country music icon has a plan—actually, several plans.

According to Nashville’s Tennessean, Brooks has left RCA Nashville, the label through which he released his 2014 album Man Against Machine. Moving forward, he will release his upcoming solo album through his own label, Pearl Records. Brooks founded Pearl Records in the early 1990s and has released and co-released several projects under the label, including Man Against Machine.

“I’ve always enjoyed being part of a team. I think you can always be part of something bigger with a team than you can be by yourself,” Brooks says. “Would I love to be part of a label group? Sure I would. But with the new streaming income now, I can’t make them money.”

Brooks originally planned to follow Man Against Machine with another new album in 2015 or 2016, but in March, he announced that he was delaying the project so that he could write what he calls “the most Garth thing I have ever done.” The Tennessean reports that Brooks now hopes to release that solo album, as well as a Christmas record with wife Trisha Yearwood, this fall.

In addition to his label change, Brooks is working on a deal with a streaming partner — “neither of the two partners you think it’s going to be, but it’s one of the biggest partners in the world,” he tells the Tennessean, adding that his digital music platform, GhostTunes, may be absorbed into a larger company — and working on a retail deal. He is also hiring a radio promotions staff to help with his new album.

“Radio might not want to be the place where you discover things, but they still are. Artists and radio will always be brothers in the discovery process of bringing new music to people,” Brooks says. “There’s a lot of different ways to promote now and a lot of options that are open, and I feel very, very lucky about that. The word the management group is using is collision or connectivity — how do you put all of those things together and make them work toward the music? They’re not just individual things out there going — they all tie together.”

Beginning Sept. 8, Brooks will launch his own SiriusXM satellite radio channel, featuring a playlist of music from Brooks and the artists who influenced him; Brooks-hosted shows and behind-the-scenes commentary; and live concert recordings, other rarities and shows hosted by the singer’s friends and fans. He’ll celebrate the new venture with an invitation-only concert at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium — his first-ever full show at the historic venue.

Since the fall of 2014, Brooks has been on the road, with Yearwood, on his World Tour. Following the conclusion of his North American World Tour dates in 2017, Brooks says he’s exploring options for shows overseas, including in Europe and Australia.

When Garth Brooks went into temporary retirement in 2001, the music industry was a much different place.

Album sales were at their peak, having sold 785 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. A piece of computer software called iTunes was in its infancy, the iTunes Store that would revolutionize music sales still two years away. Napster, the peer-to-peer file-sharing service that allowed people to illicitly swap millions of music tracks, had been shut down four months before Brooks released his eighth studio album, Scarecrow.

Brooks had been the top-selling artist of the previous decade, and he went out on top.

“What I didn’t expect, in between (now) and then, was all the rules to change,” says Brooks, in an office at Sony Music Nashville, which is releasing his new album, Man Against Machine, this week.

If Brooks is the man, the machine is an industry he sees as a potential threat to the music and the songwriter culture he loves.

Album sales in 2013 were down to 289 million. Digital sales, which weren’t even a factor when Brooks retired, are now waning as the popularity of streaming services rises. Even the sound of country radio, where Brooks once ruled, has changed, retaining few clear remnants of the music of Brooks’ heyday.

“How does a record company make its money nowadays?” Brooks asks. “iTunes, streaming, YouTube — all these things we don’t do. We call that a form of protecting the music. But that’s how they make their living. So to find a record deal in this day wasn’t easy.”

Still, Sony Music Entertainment chairman and CEO Doug Morris sought out Brooks, recently signing him to RCA Records.

When Brooks left music, he retreated to his home state, Oklahoma, to raise his three daughters. “I left something that was fabulous and I loved for something that was more fabulous and I loved more,” he says. “The hardest part was giving them up to go to college. But thank God music has allowed us to come back so I’m not sitting at home, crying myself to sleep at night. I’m working, and it feels good to work again.”

The one thing that hasn’t changed is Brooks’ ability to draw a crowd. He has already sold more than a million tickets for his comeback tour, if five sold-out concerts at Dublin’s Croke Park, which were canceled due to permit problems, are counted. He’s quickly approaching a million tickets sold in the USA alone, from concerts in just eight cities.

His first shows of 2015, a series of dates in Tulsa, go on sale Friday.

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“They’ve got a beer in this hand, and an iPhone in this one,” Brooks says of his audiences. “So how in the world are they louder than I ever remember them being? I don’t get it. The response to each song is louder, longer than anything I ever had before.”

Brooks announces each new city separately, an idea he picked up from business magnate Steve Wynn. Brooks played a series of solo concerts at Wynn’s Las Vegas casino and resort over four years of his retirement.

“I learned if you make it a destination, people have more fun,” Brooks says. “I always wondered, ‘Why do people come to Vegas?’ I thought we had to go to them. Steve goes, ‘No, you make it a destination; you make it fun for them.'”

So Brooks sets up each city with its own on-sale date, its own press conference. Plus, Brooks says, when he plays a market, he won’t play another city within 200 miles for a year.

“Mayors love it, everybody loves it, because people come in,” he says. “But what I like about it is dads and daughters say, ‘Hey, let’s take a trip together.’ Moms and dads who haven’t had a vacation on their own get a little getaway without the kids.”

Brooks’ comeback world tour could continue another two years. He plans to record another album during the tour, one that could come out as early as the fall of 2015. Even though Man Against Machine is only just now hitting stores, he’s already thinking about the songs he wants to record next.

“We’ll start from scratch with the songs that didn’t make this record because there wasn’t time,” he says. “There are a couple that broke my heart they didn’t make it.”