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.
———————
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.
