Denis Ladegaillerie
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
As Believe steps boldly into its third decade, the company is transforming its core philosophy. The foundational years were defined by a beautiful, sweeping mission: democratizing access. Believe supercharged the digital revolution to ensure that any independent artist or label could seamlessly distribute their art across every major global platform. That baseline has been triumphantly achieved.
Now, the next evolutionary leap is not just about getting independent music heard, it is about propelling artists to the absolute summit of local, regional and global charts on their own terms. The era of pure access has evolved into the era of success.
Rewriting the geography of the world charts
Believe is no longer just providing an alternative pipeline; it is going toe-to-toe with key music players in every single territory it touches. The company’s grand ambition is to secure a top-three market position across the world’s top twenty-five music landscapes, a milestone it has already cleared in twelve of those markets. This competitive edge comes from an unshakeable belief in the power of local culture.
Our view is that seventy per-cent of the value of the music industry is in local markets, namely local artists in local markets. If you take some of the money that you receive from Spotify, and start reallocating money to global artists, you are taking it away from somewhere else. It’s a zero sum game. You are taking it away from your local artists. For us, the core differentiator is that we’ve been breathing one-hundred per-cent tech, digital and music for the past twenty years. It makes us move faster in terms of having a better understanding of Spotify, YouTube, TikTok and so on than the majors do. This is creating the right competitive mood for us.”
The art of long-term value: cultivating timeless catalogues
By shifting the focus toward the top of the charts, Believe is designing a model where technical innovation and deep creative investment work in perfect harmony. Bringing independent talent into the mainstream does more than win immediate chart battles; it constructs the historic, evergreen catalogues that will define the musical heritage of tomorrow.
To fuel this engine, Believe is aggressively reinvesting in frontline A&R through a powerful two-pronged approach: cultivating brilliant internal talent spotters organically, while simultaneously partnering with the most respected, culturally significant independent labels in the world such as Germany’s heavy-metal powerhouse Nuclear Blast and France’s iconic Tôt ou Tard.
The access piece is going to remain very important. But the success piece is where we can invest differently, where we can leverage technology, where we can extract more value, price higher, get better margins, and help our artists to go to the top. That is because the value sits at the top. All the artists and the content that you can bring to the charts will not only secure a big share of the value in individual markets, or even globally; they will then create a very valuable catalogue. If you look at the past two years’ numbers, the piece that grows the fastest in the mature markets, starting with the US, is catalogue. So having valuable catalogues means very good art and very good music, but also a catalogue that has reached a significant audience. That’s why the success part is so important: because this is long-term value creation.”
Romain Vivien
Global Head of Music & President, Europe
Emotion over analytics: the era of the superfan
On the technical side, Believe is completely re-engineering its product roadmap. While the previous decade was about building stable digital delivery systems, the new blueprint focuses entirely on giving artists and labels the cutting-edge tools required to find, cultivate, and deeply engage their communities. Access opened the door to casual listeners; success is about honoring and protecting the beautiful relationship between an artist and their most passionate followers.
Now that we’ve established our access products, like distributing your content for libraries on social networks where all royalty conditions are respected, we’re shifting more and more to a success-oriented product strategy, where we invest in products to help artists and to help labels to meet their audiences and engage with them. This is what we call success on the product side.”
Romain Becker
Chief Operating Officer
This strategic evolution replaces clinical numbers with genuine human experience, ensuring that independent artists build sustainable, lifelong careers rather than chasing short-term viral trends.
Creating superfans is the core thing for me right now in the Believe business model. This requires emotional thinking. You have to bring experience to consumers and people, not feed them with data or release planning. This is what A&R is for me. It’s emotional. I think the modern music business right now is going to focus more and more on superfans. Superfans are not analytics. It’s emotional.”
Henri Jamet
General Manager, France
Crossing the Atlantic
Rather than resting on two decades of historic achievements, Believe is using its rich heritage as fuel for its most daring chapter yet: expanding its presence into the United States. As the largest, most competitive music market on Earth, the US operates by its own fierce rules. Planting a permanent flag on American soil is the ultimate validation of Believe’s creative framework, the stunning culmination of everything the company has pioneered since its beginnings in Paris.
By introducing its uniquely empathetic, digital-first artist development engine to the American landscape, Believe is confidently racing toward a borderless future. It stands ready to prove that the “access to success” model can empower creators in the world’s biggest arena, establishing a new global gold standard for artistic freedom.
Our journey has always been about breaking down walls and putting power back where it belongs, in the hands of the creators. The ‘access to success’ model is proving its worth every single day on a global scale. By bringing this exact blueprint to the United States, our new frontier, we are ready to show the world that independent music does not just belong on the charts; it is ready to lead the entire industry into its next era.”
Denis Ladegaillerie
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
The first twenty years of Believe were shaped by a simple conviction: that technology could democratize access to the global music industry. The next twenty will test an even greater ambition – that independent artists, songwriters, labels and publishers can achieve lasting success on their own terms, supported by technology, local expertise and long-term creative partnerships. The story of Believe is only just entering its next chapter.
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Article written by Eamonn Forde. Eamonn Forde is an award-winning music business journalist and author. He writes for The Guardian, Forbes; Music Week, and Music Business Worldwide and several other publications.
The Believe Story
Reclaiming its absolute privacy in July 2025, Believe officially exited the public stock market. Valued at a commanding €1.54 billion, the company was once again completely independent, unburdened by short-term shareholder demands and injected with a surge of raw, strategic energy.
Free to take massive structural swings on its own terms, Believe immediately set out to expand its model across new global territories and technical frontiers, aiming to fulfill its ultimate destiny: a unified, all-in-one artist ecosystem.
The digital awakening of the Japanese market
How do you position yourself internationally to be able to support Japanese artist developments outside of Japan? We think our position as the number one player in the region […] allows us to really support acts best because they are often their first export markets.
Denis Ladegaillerie
Founder & CEO, Believe
Believe directed its focus toward Japan, the second-largest recorded music market on the planet. Historically anchored in physical formats, the Japanese music industry remained slow to adopt digital streaming. Where competitors saw a rigid, legacy barrier, Believe recognized the ultimate digital growth playground. Believe launched Label & Artist Solutions in Japan in 2025:
“Japan was still one of the markets that was the least digital,” says Denis Ladegaillerie about the company’s expansion there. “Most of the labels still have an issue around understanding digital and transforming themselves digitally. They are about ten years behind where the US is or Europe is in terms of digital adoption.“
“We are able to position ourselves and accelerate transformation, which is what some of our competitors have not done. We have another competitive advantage in Japan, which is TuneCore. We operate it locally and it is already the third-largest market player in Japan, with a ten per-cent market share there. What we’re doing now is bolting on a higher level of service so that we can better serve and develop our set of TuneCore clients.“
Beyond local transformation, Believe planned to turn Japan into a powerful export engine.
“How do you position yourself internationally to be able to support Japanese artist developments outside of Japan?” asks Denis Ladegaillerie. “We think our position as the number one player in the region, in Indonesia, in Thailand, in the Philippines, in other countries there, allows us to really support acts best because they are often their first export markets.“
To capture this unique cultural landscape, the execution required an intimate, localized touch.
“The Japanese market has its own rules and its own habits, says Romain Becker.We need to understand what the labels and artists want, what they need.“
From grassroots hip-hop to mainstream stardom
Just as it had done a decade earlier to conquer the French market, Believe used the underground power of local hip-hop to establish its presence in Japan. The secret weapon for this strategy was the deep repository of data from TuneCore Japan, which already served as the foundational hub for the country’s urban music scene. To scale these independent creators, Believe launched its specialized imprint, PLAYCODE.
“The reason we launched hip-hop label Playcode in Japan was thanks to TuneCore, “says Sylvain Delange. “The reality is that TuneCore Japan today is, by far, the biggest hip-hop ecosystem in Japan. A large majority of hip-hop artists transit through TuneCore in one way or another, work with TuneCore in one way or another, or collaborate with TuneCore in one way or another.“
The long-term roadmap for the region was simple: upgrade the entire independent infrastructure to give grassroots talent a premium pathway to the mainstream.
“Our ambition is very simple. It’s the same as what we’ve done in France and other markets. We want to be the number one hip-hop artist development company in the country. In Japan, it’s about transforming and maximising the unique position that TuneCore has been building to create a very strong artist development engine to start transforming the industry from the inside. One where it is more digital-friendly, more focused on engaging with audiences, giving more space to up-and-coming genres such as hip-hop. Japan is a big priority,” Sylvain Delange continues.
A unified music publishing ecosystem
Two years after absorbing the administration platform Sentric, Believe officially completed its full-stack vision. In October 2025, the company launched Believe Music Publishing across multiple global territories, pairing its massive audio distribution pipeline with a digital-first approach to tracking and collecting songwriting royalties.
“With digital now being the biggest driver of collections for creators, and the publishing market exceeding €4billion after a decade of double-digit growth, we are uniquely positioned to lead the evolving publishing market, where growth continues to be increasingly driven by digital, with a publishing arm that now matches and complements our leadership in recording, said Denis Ladegaillerie on the launch of this new operational arm.
This launch transformed the company into a comprehensive destination for creators, providing a transparent framework that protects an artist’s earnings across every single revenue stream.
The four principles of creative AI
We are building machine learning on catalogue to understand what catalogue should be promoted when. […] Technology is going to be better than humans, to a large extent, to be able to surface information to humans, to market and promote. It is where the investment is going to go.
Romain Vivien
Global Head of Music & President, Europe
As artificial intelligence began reshaping the music industry, Believe treated the technology as a powerful creative ally. The company integrated automated tech tools into every tier of production, guided by a clear ethical framework based on four unshakeable pillars: Control, Consent, Compensation, and Transparency.
To demonstrate the positive power of these tools, Believe started exploring GenAi video creation, allowing independent artists to rapidly design stunning, cost-effective visual content to re-engage modern audiences.
“We can create GenAI content cheaper and faster to repackage our catalogue content and re-market, promote and expose it to new generations and new audiences”, says Romain Vivien. “We will bring in more value to our content creators, to our artist labels, and to the catalogue.“
Responsible AI in Practice
We are building machine learning on catalogue to understand what catalogue should be promoted when. […] Technology is going to be better than humans, to a large extent, to be able to surface information to humans, to market and promote. It is where the investment is going to go.
Denis Ladegaillerie
Founder & CEO, Believe
While embracing the creative upside of automation, Believe acted as a strict frontline guardian against cyber-fraud. The company deployed solutions to automatically block the distribution of AI-generated tracks partly or fully produced on unlicensed GenAI platforms.
Instead of wasting resources on artificial audio clutter, Believe also funneled its machine-learning power into optimizing real human art, building predictive models to comb through backend data and identify the precise moment a classic catalogue track should be re-promoted to global streaming platforms.
“We are building machine learning on catalogue to understand what catalogue should be promoted when,” Denis Ladegaillerie notes. “That machine learning integrates anniversary dates and events [to make strategic decisions]. Technology is going to be better than humans, to a large extent, to be able to surface information to humans, to market and promote. It is where the investment is going to go.“
By transforming raw global platform data into a localized creative compass, Believe handed its artists a massive competitive advantage.
“We are using data to understand how the local music ecosystems are evolving through time,” says Elsa Bahamonde Bourgain.”Our deep understanding of the content market and retail market locally is also a key element, because it helps us to understand which genres of music are growing ahead of market growth, and which genres of music are working better on which platforms. All this market understanding that is very data-driven also helps us to have better development strategies for our artists.“
As it celebrated two decades of reshaping the music business, Believe stood at the absolute peak of its operational power. Backed by an all-in-one tech stack, a flawless track record across multiple sub-genres, a €1B turnover and complete private independence, the company was primed for its most monumental boundary-crossing leap yet: conquering the United States.
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Article written by Eamonn Forde. Eamonn Forde is an award-winning music business journalist and author. He writes for The Guardian, Forbes; Music Week, and Music Business Worldwide and several other publications.
The Believe Story
When Believe went public in 2021, it was an undeniable power move. The blockbuster stock market debut injected a massive war chest of capital into the business, signaling to the entire financial world that Believe had officially entered the global heavyweight division, commanding a workforce of over 2,000 experts across 50 countries.
The billion-euro great escape
Believe has a significant opportunity ahead to consolidate the independent music market and create the first global major independent, at the service of artists at all stages of their career.
Denis Ladegaillerie
Founder & CEO, Believe
While the company was expanding at supersonic speed, stock market day-traders didn’t always appreciate the creative rhythm of the music business. By early 2024, a powerhouse consortium formed by founder and CEO Denis Ladegaillerie, alongside major long-term stakeholders EQT and TCV, launched a massive €1.523 billion takeover bid to buy back the company: it was time for Believe to break free from the public market and reclaim its absolute independence.
Because the trio already controlled 71.92% of Believe’s share capital and 77.42% of the voting rights, they launched a mandatory tender offer to sweep up the remaining public shares at €15 each. This represented a 43.8% premium over the previous month’s average trading price. The board of directors immediately gave the plan a unanimous, enthusiastic thumbs-up.
“Since being a public company, Believe has systematically outperformed its objectives, delivering its IPO plan two years ahead of schedule,” said Denis Ladegaillerie on revealing the consortium’s bid. “However the strength of its operational performance has not been reflected in the share price evolution. Believe has a significant opportunity ahead to consolidate the independent music market and create the first global major independent, at the service of artists at all stages of their career.“
Enter the major labels: the Warner plot twist
With the major music companies actively seeking to strengthen their positions in the independent music sector, Believe’s privatization process attracted additional interest. In early March 2024, Warner Music Group publicly confirmed that it had approached Believe regarding a potential combination and had indicated that it could value the company at a price of at least €17 per share, on a confidential, exploratory and non-binding basis.
“WMG would provide Believe with strategic support and financial stability to help the development and growth of the Company, including by accelerating its expansion into new geographies”, the major label announced in a statement.
The high-stakes standoff was thrilling but short-lived. By early April, after peaking behind the curtain, WMG issued a brief corporate memo stating that “after careful consideration, it has decided not to submit a binding offer for Believe.” The runway was now completely cleared for Denis Ladegaillerie’s independence mission.
Reclaiming the independent crown
With enhanced financial agility […] the group is now best equipped to achieve our collective goal: to make Believe the global leader in independent music, serving artists and labels worldwide.
Denis Ladegaillerie
Founder & CEO, Believe
Once Warner dropped out, the buy-back plan accelerated at blinding speed. By June 2024, the founder-led consortium had secured over 85% of Believe’s public shares, quickly climbing to a crushing 95% total control by the end of the month. The company was officially locked down, privatized, and liberated from public market distractions.
“Following the friendly takeover bid we initiated, the Consortium now holds 95% of Believe’s capital, announced Denis Ladegaillerie. “Our shareholders have overwhelmingly decided to tender their shares to the offer, leading to a real success! With enhanced financial agility and the proven expertise of the Consortium members, the group is now best equipped to achieve our collective goal: to make Believe the global leader in independent music, serving artists and labels worldwide.“
No speed limits on global growth
While the multi-billion-euro corporate saga was unfolding in the boardrooms, the music machine outside didn’t skip a single beat. In March 2024, Believe revealed that its 2023 annual revenues had climbed to an impressive €880.3 million, backed by the news that over for TuneCore only, 80,000 independent musicians were actively using the automated TuneCore Accelerator marketing engine to amplify their global reach.
The international expansion rolled on without interruption. Believe Japan launched PLAYCODE, a dedicated new label engineered to champion the underground Japanese hip-hop scene, perfectly mirroring the hyper-local hip-hop blueprint that conquered France a decade prior. By July 2024, Believe secured a 25% stake in Romania’s premier music force, Global Records, and by September, regulators gave the green light for Believe to officially absorb Turkey’s independent powerhouse, Doğan Music Company (DMC).
To top off this stellar run of growth, TuneCore announced a staggering milestone: it had successfully funneled over $4 billion directly into the pockets of self-releasing artists since 2006. By August, Believe reported H1 2024 revenues of €474.1 million, a sharp 14.1% leap forward compared to the previous year.
Navigating the modern frontiers of sound
This milestone took place during a period of significant change across the music industry. In February 2024, Universal Music Group temporarily removed its catalogue from TikTok during a licensing dispute, before reaching a new agreement with the platform in May. Believe, which had long viewed short-form video as an important channel for music discovery, continued to develop its capabilities on the platform, rolling out TikTok’s Add to Music feature across 163 markets to help artists reach new audiences.
The broader international music economy continued its historic upward march. According to IFPI data, global recorded music revenues grew 4.8% to reach an all-time high of $29.6 billion in 2024. Streaming subscriptions jumped 9.5% to hit a staggering 752 million paid users worldwide, driving a massive $20.4 billion streaming economy that captured 69% of the total market space. To illustrate the scale of this digital ecosystem, Spotify revealed it had distributed a massive $9 billion to rights holders in a single year.
As Believe approached its twentieth anniversary, the company had assembled the key elements of the model it had been building for two decades: a global technology platform, strong local market positions, financial flexibility and a comprehensive artist development offering. It was now positioned to pursue its long-term ambition of becoming the world’s leading global artist development company.
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Article written by Eamonn Forde. Eamonn Forde is an award-winning music business journalist and author. He writes for The Guardian, Forbes; Music Week, and Music Business Worldwide and several other publications.
The Believe Story
By 2023, the global music business was firing on all cylinders, riding a wave of double-digit growth. Total industry revenues climbed 10.2% to reach a staggering $28.6 billion, according to the IFPI. Paid subscription streaming alone generated $14 billion, and when you factored in ad-supported plays, streaming made up more than two-thirds (67.3%) of the entire global marketplace.
Believe was outpacing the boom. The company crossed a massive milestone by generating over €1 billion in digital music sales the previous year, reporting €760.8 million in total revenue for 2022. That momentum showed no signs of slowing, with H1 2023 revenues jumping another 17.9% to reach €415.4 million.
But Believe’s ultimate goal was never just about scaling up distribution volume. Over nearly two decades, the company had systematically built out separate divisions, including a record label ecosystem, localized artist marketing teams, and a massive entry-level platform through its 2015 purchase of TuneCore. In March 2023, Believe made its biggest acquisition to date by purchasing the music publishing platform Sentric for €47 million, locking in the final, vital piece of its business model.
Connecting the songwriter to the system
The acquisition of Sentric is the first step for Believe in the roll-out of a global and comprehensive publishing offer. The growth and digital transformation of the songwriters’ market is opening-up many opportunities.
Denis Ladegaillerie
Founder & CEO, Believe
To understand why the Sentric deal was such a massive milestone, you have to look at how a song makes money. For years, Believe had been a master at handling the master rights, the actual audio recording of a song. But every time a track gets streamed, it also generates money for the publishing rights, the underlying songwriting, lyrics, and composition.
Sentric, founded in Liverpool in 2006, was an absolute genius at hunting down those songwriting royalties. By 2023, the company had partnered with over 70 collecting societies across 200 territories, representing more than 4 million songs and 400,000 songwriters. By buying Sentric, Believe could instantly offer a world-class songwriting royalty network to its entire roster.
“The acquisition of Sentric is the first step for Believe in the roll-out of a global and comprehensive publishing offer,” said Denis Ladegaillerie, when announcing the deal. “The growth and digital transformation of the songwriters’ market is opening-up many opportunities. We are excited to be able to immediately expand the services we provide to our existing TuneCore clients with Sentric’s best-in-class royalty collection service, while starting to work on future innovative products and services for all of Believe’s songwriters and publishers.“
The power of a full-stack machine
What we wanted to do here was to enrich our set of capabilities in terms of services. With TuneCore, we wanted to address the DIY market as we did not have the capability to do that. And with Sentric, we wanted to be able to start bolting on publishing. We felt it was better for us to acquire these capabilities.
Denis Ladegaillerie
Founder & CEO, Believe
This acquisition fulfilled Believe’s long-term dream of becoming a vertically-integrated music company. Instead of an artist having to hire one company to put their music on Spotify, a separate label to market it, and a completely different corporate entity to collect their songwriting checks, Believe could now handle the entire lifetime of a music career under one roof.
“What we wanted to do here was to enrich our set of capabilities in terms of services,” Denis Ladegaillerie explains. “With TuneCore, we wanted to address the DIY market as we did not have the capability to do that. And with Sentric, we wanted to be able to start bolting on publishing. We felt it was better for us to acquire these capabilities.“
When these separate components are connected, they create a powerful ecosystem where a bedroom artist can start on TuneCore, find an audience, graduate to Believe’s advanced marketing tiers, and have their global publishing royalties tracked automatically.
“Ultimately, a modern music company is a full-stack music company that is able to support artists all the way from entry to the top with different programmes, with different ways of working with them,” proposes Denis Ladegaillerie.
Strategic patience beats rushing the market
While legacy music conglomerates had offered these combined services for decades, Believe’s leadership purposely chose to wait until the digital infrastructure was perfectly mature before making their move into publishing. Building a global royalty-tracking network from scratch would have taken years of trial and error; buying an established tech specialist was a much smarter play.
“Many of our competitors had already been doing it for ages, and we had to become competitive,” says Henri Jamet. “Denis is a really clever person. He wants to do it by order. The fact was that he was waiting for publishing [to come along]. When he acquired Sentric, I understood how he had made the right move. We needed the tools in place first to start publishing. We could have developed publishing organically in a small office, but acquiring a specialist in digital copyright management was the best thing to do, before then hiring people in multiple countries.“
Keeping more of the pie
The Sentric deal was taking a strong tech-empowered publishing administration company into a creative business so that we could move up the value chain and grab more margin
Romain Vivien
Global Head of Music & President, Europe
From a purely financial standpoint, bringing Sentric into the family allowed Believe to move further up the industry food chain. In the streaming era, where billions of micro-transactions occur across the internet daily, having an automated tech platform that registers songs and sweeps up royalties directly means keeping a much larger piece of the financial pie.
“The Sentric deal was taking a strong tech-empowered publishing administration company into a creative business so that we could move up the value chain and grab more margin,” says Romain Vivien. “The people we are working with, and who are also signing developing artists, continue to do a fantastic job – better than anyone on the collection, the registration, and the administration side. This is key, specifically with most of the revenue now coming from the digital space.“
By the close of 2023, Believe had successfully read the digital landscape’s growth curve once again. By combining automated royalty tracking with a global independent network, the addition of a full-scale publishing engine positioned the company perfectly for its next major corporate chapter.
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Article written by Eamonn Forde. Eamonn Forde is an award-winning music business journalist and author. He writes for The Guardian, Forbes; Music Week, and Music Business Worldwide and several other publications.
The Believe Story
Fresh off its successful 2021 stock market launch, Believe was equipped to accelerate its global expansion. But while its international teams were busy opening new doors, the company’s biggest story was unfolding right in its home market.
For years, France had served as Believe’s primary laboratory, a testing ground to prove that an agile, tech-driven company could spot underground movements and nurture overlooked talent. In 2022, that long-term vision reached a defining milestone, as Believe became the leading company for local repertoire in its home market, demonstrating that a new approach to artist development could thrive at scale.
Based on the final sales tally from 2021, Believe announced it had become the second-largest music company in France for annual market share of frontline domestic artist albums. Local-language music was completely ruling the French charts, leaving massive American and British pop superstars trailing in the dust. Leading the charge for Believe were blockbuster releases like rap icon Jul’s Demain ça ira. To secure this position, Believe kicked off 2022 by acquiring a 51% stake in the influential French independent label Jo&Co.
The virtue of strategic patience
You have exceptions […] but, in most cases, it takes three years to develop an artist from zero to the top 10. It takes five years to develop them to become regularly number one Billboard-charted artists. And it takes ten years to make them household names in some countries. And it takes another ten years to get them to become household names in several countries. It’s a long investment and development cycle
Denis Ladegaillerie
Founder & CEO, Believe
This massive chart takeover didn’t happen by accident, nor did it happen overnight. While the digital age moves at lightning speed, Believe’s core philosophy has always been anchored in a deep, patient development cycle.
“You have exceptions and you have accidents where it really goes much faster, but, in most cases, it takes three years to develop an artist from zero to the top 10,” explains Denis Ladegaillerie. “It takes five years to develop them to become regularly number one Billboard-charted artists. And it takes ten years to make them household names in some countries. And it takes another ten years to get them to become household names in several countries. It’s a long investment and development cycle.“
The ultimate artist retention secret
I always say, ‘To sign an artist is a good thing, but to renew them is even more difficult.’ In ten years, across AllPoints, we didn’t lose a single artist. Nobody left. We had the artists, but new artists were also coming through.
Henri Jamet
Managing Director, France
Believe’s early and bold investments in the French hip-hop underground paid off as the genre became the country’s dominant musical force, eventually commanding over half of the entire French music market. But long-term leadership isn’t built on signing breakout talent alone. It’s built on earning artists’ trust and growing alongside them throughout their careers.
In an industry where successful independent acts routinely get poached by large label, Believe achieved a flawless retention record.
“You cannot exclude the fact that French hip-hop is mass market,” says Henri Jamet. “It’s now more than 50% of the market. We have been a leader for years on this. So, of course, it gives us a competitive advantage. I always say, ‘To sign an artist is a good thing, but to renew them is even more difficult.’ In ten years, across AllPoints, we didn’t lose a single artist. Nobody left. We had the artists, but new artists were also coming through. All the artists that came at the start, they stayed. That’s how we managed to get this position.“
Translating streaming innovation into hometown advantage
A major driving force behind this domestic stronghold was the execution of the company’s Artist Services division. Instead of viewing technology as a cold, automated pipeline, Believe used its deep relationships with streaming platforms to ensure that underground French artists were the very first to exploit new digital features, playlist algorithms, and app updates.
“The first years were about being the best in class on everything that was digital marketing,” says Elsa Bahamonde Bourgain. “Of course, we have an excellent relationship with all the streaming platforms. So it was how we translated the innovations happening on the DSP side, on the platform side, and on the products side so that the artists and labels working with us were able to maximise opportunities.“
To make those streaming innovations actually move the needle, the strategy relied on total cultural alignment. The boots on the ground had to speak the exact same language as the regional communities they were breaking.
“When we think about artist services, it is always local,” Elsa Bahamonde Bourgain notes. “We are thinking about how these local artists are interacting locally in the market. With the local imprints that we have launched, the idea is to have a strong local brand that supports artists in the local market.“
Regional frontlines, global mothership
What we try to do at Believe is to have a very local approach to understanding local artists with local teams that discuss and talk the same language – and can connect and create the best possible situation for the artist in their country with their genre of music.
Elsa Bahamonde-Bourgain
President of Artist Services and Label & Artist Solutions,
This setup works because of a highly efficient division of labor. By separating creative cultural work from technical administrative heavy lifting, Believe engineered a system where regional music experts can focus entirely on the artists, while a unified tech mothership handles the global scale in the background.
“What we try to do at Believe is to have a very local approach to understanding local artists with local teams that discuss and talk the same language – and can connect and create the best possible situation for the artist in their country with their genre of music”, Elsa Bahamonde Bourgain explains. “Believe also has a strong central platform that enables local teams to make sure they are concentrating on the music, on the artist. Then centrally we implement everything they need to operate at scale without having to develop anything locally. This is one of our strengths: the fact that we are locally built and centrally and globally empowered.“
The blueprint proven right
This French masterclass unfolded against a background of staggering global growth. The international music market surged 9% to reach $26.2 billion in 2022, with streaming accounting for a commanding two-thirds (67%) of the total pie. By October, an unprecedented 100,000 brand-new tracks were flooding onto streaming services every single day.
In this hyper-competitive ocean of music, Believe was firing on all cylinders. The company revealed it had generated a massive €577.2 million in total revenue for 2021 (up from €441.4 million in 2020), while its DIY division, TuneCore, reported paying out $222 million to artists in 2021 alone.
By the end of 2022, the exact same operational blueprint that conquered France began paying off in other major European territories. Believe shattered industry expectations by announcing it had become the third-largest recorded music company in the German streaming market for local repertoire, sitting comfortably right behind legacy giants Universal and Sony.
Believe’s foundational vision, that the future of music belongs to domestic talent supported by borderless tech, had officially graduated from a bold theory into an undeniable reality.
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Article written by Eamonn Forde. Eamonn Forde is an award-winning music business journalist and author. He writes for The Guardian, Forbes; Music Week, and Music Business Worldwide and several other publications.
The Believe Story
Every successful startup follows a familiar coming-of-age story. It begins with the founder’s personal savings or early angel investors, moves through rounds of venture capital backing, and eventually faces the ultimate graduation: the Initial Public Offering (IPO). An IPO is the exact moment a company opens its doors to the world, letting institutional investors and regular people buy shares on a public stock exchange like the Paris Euronext or the New York Stock Exchange.
When a company goes public, its value is no longer a boardroom estimate; it is decided in real-time by supply and demand. If the company is generating massive heat and hitting its growth goals, the share price climbs. Tech giants have used this path to blast into the stratosphere; Google did it in 2004 with a $23 billion valuation, and Facebook followed in 2012, raising $16 billion to hit a massive $104 billion valuation. For an ambitious company, an IPO is the ultimate war chest generator, providing the public equity capital needed to acquire competitors, hire top-tier talent, and break into new global territories.
By 2021, after fifteen years of independent scaling, Believe was ready for its own public validation. On June 1, 2021, the company officially launched its IPO on the Paris Euronext, aiming to raise €300 million by floating 14.35% of the company on the open market.
Developing an innovative technological platform, having the best digital expertise on the market, with local teams close to artists and independent labels, directly or indirectly, in the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan to build relationships of trust with them based on respect, transparency and fairness: these are the fundamental elements serving our ambition
Denis Ladegaillerie
Founder & CEO, Believe
“Our ambition is to become the global leader in developing independent artists and labels in the digital world […] [An IPO] will allow us to finance our growth, in particular through targeted acquisitions. Developing an innovative technological platform, having the best digital expertise on the market, with local teams close to artists and independent labels, directly or indirectly, in the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan to build relationships of trust with them based on respect, transparency and fairness: these are the fundamental elements serving our ambition”, said Denis Ladegaillerie at the time of the launch.
The financial community loved the pitch. Bidding within an indicative range between €19.50 and €22.50 per share, the market snapped up an initial issuance of 15,384,616 brand-new shares. Settling at an opening price of €19.50 per share, Believe officially achieved a massive debut market capitalization of €1.87 billion. Reflecting on the successful launch, Denis Ladegaillerie noted that Believe was now “crossing a new threshold in its development by going public”.
Going on a global shopping spree
The stock market launch wasn’t just a vanity play; it was backed by explosive underlying business numbers. Believe’s global revenues for the first half of 2021 had skyrocketed by 30% to hit €260 million, up from €196 million during the same period the previous year. To set the stage for this public expansion, their DIY platform TuneCore had just expanded its flags into Africa and Southeast Asia earlier that spring, riding high on the news that it had funneled $412 million directly into independent artist pockets in 2020 alone.
With €300 million in fresh public capital burning a hole in its pocket, Believe immediately went on a strong global acquisition campaign to increase its international market share.
In November 2021, the company acquired a 25% stake in the prominent French independent label Play Two. That very same month, Believe dropped €13 million to secure a 76% stake in South Indian powerhouse Think Music. By December, they extended their reach across the Pacific, securing a 15% stake in the Philippines’ Viva Music & Artists Group.
Upgrading the Independent Tech Stack
Alongside this corporate shopping spree, Believe funneled significant resources back into its internal technology, ensuring independent artists had the absolute best digital tools on the market.
In September 2021, drawing on the backend tech from their previous acquisition of Soundsgood, the company rolled out Backstage Link, a sophisticated smart-link tool designed to help artists track and optimize their fan traffic. By November, they launched specialized social distribution tools for DIY creators, allowing independent artists to seamlessly drop their tracks directly into the music libraries of hyper-viral social platforms including TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Instagram Reels.
The Great 2021 Music Gold Rush
This public graduation occurred during an absolutely staggering boom period for the entire global music ecosystem. According to data from the IFPI, global recorded music revenues surged by 18.5% to reach $25.9 billion in 2021. Streaming was the undisputed king, jumping 24.3% to hit $16.9 billion and capturing a dominant 65% of the total market. By the end of the year, the global population of paid streaming subscribers had grown to 523 million users.
Capital was flying everywhere as corporations scrambled to consolidate music assets. In March, a consortium led by rap icon Jay-Z sold the streaming service Tidal to tech company Square for $300 million. In May, Sony Music Entertainment completed its purchase of independent distributor AWAL and Kobalt Neighbouring Rights for $430 million. The major label buying spree didn’t stop there; by December, Warner Music Group snapped up independent hip-hop haven 300 Entertainment for $400 million, while Sony bought up the remaining 50% of Ultra Records it didn’t already own.
However, the most monumental financial event in the major label world occurred in September 2021, when legacy giant Universal Music Group (UMG) launched its own blockbuster IPO on the Euronext Amsterdam stock exchange. Handed an initial reference price of €18.50 per share, UMG’s stock went wild on opening day, peaking at €25.61 before settling at €24.97, handing the major a staggering €45 billion valuation by closing bell.
Independence is the new mainstream
In a year defined by mega-corporate mergers and multi-billion-dollar major label valuations, the Believe IPO stood as a massive, timely victory for the independent music community. It proved to Wall Street and global tech investors that music’s digital future wasn’t just a playground for legacy corporate conglomerates.
By holding its own and performing strongly on the Paris Euronext, Believe sent an undeniable message to the entire global industry: in the streaming era, independent artistry was no longer a beautiful, alternative market niche. Independence had officially become the new mainstream.
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Article written by Eamonn Forde. Eamonn Forde is an award-winning music business journalist and author. He writes for The Guardian, Forbes; Music Week, and Music Business Worldwide and several other publications.
The Believe Story
By March 2020, the physical world came to a sudden, grinding halt. As the Covid-19 pandemic triggered global lockdowns, offices closed, streets emptied, and the live music industry vanished overnight. Concert venues were shuttered, tours were canceled, and artists were left stranded, wondering how they would survive without the stage.
Yet, while the physical world was on pause, the digital world switched into hyperdrive. Stuck inside, millions of people turned to digital entertainment as a lifeline, causing massive surges in music streaming, podcast listening, and video viewing. For artists, a “digital-first” mindset was no longer just a forward-thinking business strategy: it became a financial life jacket. While they experimented with livestreams and direct-to-fan merchandise sales to keep the lights on, the automated nature of digital streaming kept royalties flowing directly into their pockets.
Saving the Songs of the Soil
In India, the lockdown posed an immediate threat to traditional musical communities. While urban pop stars could easily pivot to streaming concerts from their living rooms, rural folk musicians living in remote villages were completely cut off from their audiences and essential supplies. Because these traditional artists relied entirely on local festivals and physical gatherings to survive, the pandemic threatened to wipe out their livelihoods entirely.
Believe stepped up in April 2020, partnering with the non-profit Anahad Foundation to launch Let’s Folk Together, an artist relief fundraiser aimed at supporting 5,000 folk artists across the country. The press release issued at that time was adamant:
“Today, the folk music community in India find themselves in an extremely tragic circumstance as they remain in lockdown in remote villages, cut-off from metros and essential supplies and while India fights to curb the spread of the virus, the future of the folk music community, which relies completely on their craft as musicians focused mainly on shows and events, is at risk.“
A million dollars a day for the bedroom producer
Right in the middle of this global shutdown, Believe officially rolled its automated independent distribution platform, TuneCore, into India in July 2020. The timing was impeccable. Globally, TuneCore was already paying out a staggering $1 million a day to self-releasing artists, crossing a historic milestone of $2 billion in total independent payouts by that October.
For small, grassroots Indian acts with no corporate label backing, the platform provided an immediate financial engine when all other doors were shut. TuneCore quickly integrated into the local digital fabric, partnering with domestic streaming giant Gaana in October. This local launch gave Believe an incredibly powerful talent incubator; independent acts could kickstart their careers completely on their own terms through TuneCore, while Believe’s local teams monitored the data to identify who was ready to be graduated into their premium artist services and full-label divisions.
Bypassing Bollywood for the heartland
I’ve seen this journey over and over again, where the real growth is coming from regional markets. The regions are hungry for culture. The culture there is different, the artist languages are different, and even sounds sometimes can be very different.
Vivek Raina
Managing Director, India
Believe’s rapid expansion in India was built on a different approach to artist development, as they chose to ignore the standard industry playbook. While Bollywood remained the dominant force in the country’s recorded music industry, Believe India did the exact opposite. They looked past the movie studios and the massive metros, wagering that the true, untapped future of Indian music lay in the incredibly diverse regional music scenes bubbling up in “tier two” and “tier three” cities.
“Our strategy was to remain big in the regional markets,” says Vivek Raina. “By regional, that means tier two and tier three cities. And when the boom came, the biggest beneficiaries were us because we were not into Bollywood. Bollywood generally concentrated on the mainstream Hindi OST Content. So when the regional boom happened, the biggest beneficiaries were people like us.“
As affordable smartphones and mobile data spread rapidly through India’s smaller towns, regional audiences grew hungry for music sung in their own local languages and distinct cultural dialects.
“I’ve seen this journey over and over again, where the real growth is coming from regional markets,” Vivek Raina explains. “The regions are hungry for culture. The culture there is different, the artist languages are different, and even sounds sometimes can be very different.“
Fueling the underdog labels
Rather than focusing exclusively on the largest, most established players, Believe India acted as a nimble catalyst and developed partnerships with independent local underdog labels across the country. Combining local expertise with financial investment, technology and digital services, the company helped these labels expand their reach while contributing to the growth of India’s increasingly diverse music ecosystem.
“The way the market was structured was that you had global majors and you have local majors – and they pretty much covered 90% of the market”, Vivek Raina explains. “That was between six, seven or eight labels. But there were smaller labels which had a great capacity for developing artists under the umbrella. Apart from this, however, you also need financial support if they are to compete with the local majors or international majors. You picked up the markets where you have the highest possibility of developing the next stage of artists. It was a combination of technological support, human intelligence, and financial support.“
The long-term payoff
Mahra Tora is an imprint for a segment which, three or four years ago, was a very small market segment in India. The idea is not to sign at scale, but to pick up an artist at the emerging level, where we can spend time, energy, and cash in developing this artist further.
Vivek Raina
Managing Director, India
This patient, grassroots strategy laid the foundation for entirely new sub-genres to explode into the mainstream. A perfect example of this blueprint was the June 2025 launch of Mahra Tora, Believe India’s dedicated imprint for Haryanvi music; a distinct, highly urban regional sound that was practically invisible to the mainstream industry just a few years prior.
“Mahra Tora is an imprint for a segment which, three or four years ago, was a very small market segment in India,” says Vivek Raina. “The sound is very close to what Punjabi music is, very urban. The idea of the imprint is not to sign at scale, but to pick up an artist at the emerging level, where we can spend time, energy, and cash in developing this artist further.“
By refusing to back down during the uncertainty of 2020, Believe’s deep investment in the cultural wealth of India’s heartland has rewritten the balance of power in the market.
“We are already top three in the market,” says Vivek Raina, looking at the position Believe now holds. “We want to be number one in the next two years.“
By the close of 2020, Believe’s strategy in India demonstrated how digital infrastructure and local expertise could reinforce one another. Combining technology, regional partnerships and long-term artist development, the company strengthened its position in one of the world’s fastest-growing music markets.
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Article written by Eamonn Forde. Eamonn Forde is an award-winning music business journalist and author. He writes for The Guardian, Forbes; Music Week, and Music Business Worldwide and several other publications.
The Believe Story
Back in the twentieth century, stealing music took actual physical labor. If you wanted to run a piracy ring or distribute bootlegged concert tapes, you needed a brick-and-mortar pressing plant, boxes of raw materials, and a distribution truck.
For the anti-piracy teams running around trying to protect artist music, the target was clear: find the illegal factories and lock the doors. Even when CD burners and early file-sharing networks threw the industry into a loop around the turn of the millennium, piracy still required individual human users downloading individual files.
Streaming, however, completely rewrote the rules of engagement, giving birth to a completely invisible breed of financial scam. Instead of copying songs to sell them on the street, digital scammers began deploying bot farms, fake artist profiles, and manipulated playlists to automatically rack up millions of automated plays.
The goal wasn’t to share music; it was to trick the algorithms and siphon unearned cash out of the shared pool of money that streaming platforms used to pay legitimate creators. By 2019, according to data from the IFPI, global streaming revenue had climbed to $11.4 billion, accounting for a massive 56.1% of the entire global recorded music market. There was a giant pile of digital money sitting on the table, and internet scammers rushed in to grab a piece of it.
Catching the Copycats at the Front Door
We were at the forefront to address the fraud problem, which can be seen as a direct value extraction of money which should go in the pool of royalties for the artists. Our mission is centered on creating fair conditions for the artist and helping the DSPs to fight against fraud.
Romain Becker
Group Chief Operating Officer
While the rise of automated generative artificial intelligence would eventually expand this problem by allowing scammers to cheaply pump out millions of artificial tracks, the foundational battle lines were drawn in 2019. Believe was among the absolute first music companies to recognize that streaming manipulation was going to threaten the livelihood of real musicians, and they moved fast to protect their ecosystem.
At the time, Spotify was tracking around 40,000 brand-new song uploads every single day. To keep fraudulent files out of that massive daily wave, Believe partnered with the tech firm ACRCloud in July 2019, implementing an advanced audio-fingerprinting system. Think of it like an automated digital scanner: before a song could be distributed to streaming stores, the software checked its unique sonic print against existing databases to ensure a scammer wasn’t trying to re-upload someone else’s copyrighted work to steal their royalties.
“We were at the forefront to address the fraud problem, which can be seen as a direct value extraction of money which should go in the pool of royalties for the artists,” says Romain Becker. “Our mission is centered on creating fair conditions for the artist and helping the DSPs to fight against fraud.“
The ten-dollar streaming trap
To clean up the streaming landscape, Believe realised it couldn’t just build technical firewalls; it also had to educate independent labels and artists. Many independent creators didn’t understand the inner workings of digital platforms, making them easy targets for shady marketing companies making fraudulent promises.
We started an entire compliance process to be able to support the DSPs to identify fraudsters, educate our artists and our labels on what could be considered as fraud and how to avoid the fraud trap, Romain Becker explains.
The biggest risk was that ordinary, well-meaning independent labels were falling under the influence of digital scammers who cloaked fake bot plays as legitimate marketing campaigns.
“Some of our clients might receive a compelling email saying, ‘Hey, do you want to create fifty-thousand streams for your artist for ten bucks?’” says Romain Becker. “If I was a label, I might think, ‘Yeah, let’s try it!’ But this has a consequence. We trust our clients and we trust our artists to understand the implications of this. So rather than fighting the problem by just punishing or cutting contracts with them, we had an educational approach on what constitutes fraud, how to avoid falling into the trap of fraud, and how to avoid an appealing value proposition that will turn against you at the end of the day.“
Playing Cop on Repeat Offenders
We’ve built a fraud streaming policy which has gradual penalties that can go all the way up to contract termination with Believe. Have we terminated some contracts with some labels? Yes, we’ve done that
Romain Becker
Group Chief Operating Officer
While Believe preferred to teach independent artists how to spot these traps, they maintained a zero-tolerance policy for accounts that willfully chose to cheat the system. If a distributor lets fraudulent streams slide, it dilutes the payouts for every honest artist on the platform.
“If the education process didn’t work then it meant that we had a client who had decided to put fraud at the center of their business model, and they are people we can’t work with,” Romain Becker says bluntly. “For this, we’ve built a fraud streaming policy which has gradual penalties that can go all the way up to contract termination with Believe. Have we terminated some contracts with some labels? Yes, we’ve done that. We’ve done that because they were not respecting the rules, they had not understood the warning, and they were creating an issue in the ecosystem. We have to police this.“
Uniting the global industry
As streaming fraud expanded into an industry-wide headache, with some modern estimates suggesting that artificial plays impact nearly 10% of all global streams, Believe pushed for a united response. Protecting the integrity of the digital music economy required every major distributor and tech platform to start sharing their security data.
This shared mission laid the groundwork for the 2023 launch of the Music Fights Fraud Alliance (MFFA). Believe and its DIY arm TuneCore joined forces as founding members alongside digital giants like Spotify and Amazon Music to create a united, cross-industry frontline against streaming manipulation.
By the close of 2019, protecting the integrity of digital music had become an integral part of Believe’s operating model. Beyond enabling digital distribution and artist development, the company increasingly invested in the technologies, policies and industry partnerships needed to support a trusted and sustainable streaming ecosystem.
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Article written by Eamonn Forde. Eamonn Forde is an award-winning music business journalist and author. He writes for The Guardian, Forbes; Music Week, and Music Business Worldwide and several other publications.
The Believe Story
By 2018, the global music streaming economy had matured from a wild frontier into a massive, highly structured marketplace. According to IFPI data, global revenues rose 9.7% to reach $19.1 billion, with subscription streaming accounting for a solid 37% of the entire market. Believe was riding this wave at full speed, reporting an annual corporate turnover of $500 million and commanding a global team of 700 employees.
With this massive scale came a new challenge. Independent artists who had used Believe for years to get their music onto digital platforms were growing up. They were no longer just looking for a way to get their files onto Spotify or Apple Music; they needed full-scale marketing campaigns, branding expertise, and localized support; but they still refused to sign away their independence to traditional major labels.
To bridge this gap, Believe officially formalized a brand-new corporate arm in 2018: the Artist Services division. It was a structural leap forward designed to give independent artists the muscle of a major label while preserving greater flexibility in the way partnerships were structured.
Inventing the digital record label team
The building blocks for this new division had been quietly developing within the company’s local offices. In France, Henri Jamet had realised early on that modern streaming campaigns required an entirely new type of music executive; one who understood social media algorithms and streaming store optimization rather than traditional physical manufacturing.
“I helped develop artist services, the label model and the project manager function,” says Henri Jamet. “The role of community manager didn’t exist at the traditional level in music companies. I hired one person to manage our Deezer, Spotify and Instagram pages, which was a completely new approach.“
Going local in underserved markets
When we think about artist services, it is always local. We are thinking about local artists and how these local artists are interacting in their market. The idea is to have a strong local brand that supports artists in the local market.
Elsa Bahamonde-Bourgain
President Artist Services and Label & Artist Solutions
While many major labels organized their international operations around established music centres such as New York, London and Paris, Believe’s Artist Services division emphasized local teams and expertise. The company invested in high-growth markets across Asia and Latin America, adapting its model to best serve each local music ecosystem.
Elsa Bahamonde Bourgain, who joined Believe to scale these international operations, explains how the division was built from the ground up to support regional music ecosystems.
“The idea was to launch Artist Services to accelerate our position in the artist services field across the different countries that we decided to launch in,” Elsa Bahamonde Bourgain explains. “When we started twenty years ago, we concentrated more on how to best distribute artists and labels, and how to develop them. What we did really well at that time was to be very early in some countries in Asia and in Latin America where perhaps other players in the music industry were not investing so much.“
The demand for these hands-on marketing campaigns grew organically from the artists themselves as their digital fanbases expanded.
“We observed in Asia, in Latin America, and also in Europe that Artist Services had been started very naturally at the request of some of our artists to support them on the marketing side, to support them on how to develop them on branding activities, on a more 360-degree approach,” Elsa Bahamonde Bourgain says.
To turn this demand into a professional reality, Believe focused on hiring local market experts who understood the distinct cultural nuances of their own domestic music scenes.
“My first mission was to hire the teams locally to make sure that we had great leaders to develop artist services in each one of those territories, to position the offer and create strong brands in the different countries,” Elsa Bahamonde Bourgain says. “When we think about artist services, it is always local. We are thinking about local artists and how these local artists are interacting in their market. The idea is to have a strong local brand that supports artists in the local market. The mission was to make sure everyone in the market – the artists, the producers, and all the people working with them – understood all this additional value we were bringing to them.“
Flexible pathways for artist development
To make this model work and unlike more fixed contractual models, Believe designed Artist Services to be entirely fluid, acting as a modular bridge that lets artists scale their operational backing up or down depending on the exact timing of their careers.
The structure allowed artists to move between service levels as their careers evolved, providing support that could be adapted to changing needs and ambitions.
“The idea is to not be siloed in how we work with an artist,” Elsa Bahamonde Bourgain insists. “An artist will go through a path through their career, and what we want to do is to ensure that we can support them at every single stage.“
This flexibility meant that an artist could easily transition from basic digital distribution to full-scale marketing support as their momentum grew.
“We have several interesting cases of artists who started on TuneCore and then, at some point, they decided to sign with Artist Services, or they decided to sign with artist distribution”, Elsa Bahamonde Bourgain notes. “There are other cases of artists that moved from artist distribution to artist services because their needs were changing and evolving through their career. Our idea is not to block one artist in one offer, but it’s making sure that we adapt to what an artist needs at each moment.“
From Pop Queens to Hip-Hop Superstars
Take Nancy Ajram, a big pop Lebanese artist.She was previously signed to an artist distribution deal. We moved her into an Artist Services deal because she was willing to have more marketing expertise actively supporting her in her development.
Elsa Bahamonde-Bourgain
President Artist Services and Label & Artist Solutions
The real-world proof of this modular strategy quickly rolled in across international borders, showing its effectiveness across completely different musical genres and regions.
“Take Nancy Ajram, a big pop Lebanese artist,” Elsa Bahamonde Bourgain shares. “She was previously signed to an artist distribution deal. We moved her into an Artist Services deal because she was willing to have more marketing expertise actively supporting her in her development.“
A similar, long-term development story unfolded in Southeast Asia, where Believe used its local infrastructure to turn an emerging underground artist into a massive regional headliner.
“We also have artists that were, for example, just signing to Artist Services, but we signed them at a very early stage”, Elsa Bahamonde Bourgain continues. “What we have done is also to grow the services that, even inside artist services, we were delivering to them. Saran is the top hip-hop artist in Thailand and we’ve been working with him for the past five years. When we signed him, he was really at this emerging phase, so his needs were more limited to the digital side. The market five years ago in Thailand was extremely organic and digitally driven, but now we are working with him on branding and on PR. It is a global collaboration.“
Feeding the streaming algorithms
The secret engine behind Believe’s Artist Services model was a heavy reliance on data tracking. Instead of planning a release based on old-school music executive guesswork, Believe used a multitude of digital data points to perfectly sequence their marketing moves and feed the streaming platform algorithms.
“We are very data-driven and powered”, Elsa Bahamonde Bourgain explains. “We use a lot of data to understand the best orchestration of levers on the marketing side. Is it better to launch this kind of media buy campaign, then the influencer campaign, then do the release? Then what is the additional media buy or PR that you need to do at that moment to make sure that you are impacting properly on the audiences and the algorithms that exist in the ecosystem? How do you make sure that TikTok is working well versus what you’re doing on Spotify, Meta, and all the other different platforms? This is one of the big areas where technology and data are working together for us in artist services.“
By combining the analytical precision of a tech company with the localized nuance of a record label, the launch of the Artist Services division permanently rewired the definition of music career success. Believe proved that an independent creator could conquer the global streaming ecosystem while retaining absolute control over their own work.
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Article written by Eamonn Forde. Eamonn Forde is an award-winning music business journalist and author. He writes for The Guardian, Forbes; Music Week, and Music Business Worldwide and several other publications.