By 2009, digital music had grown to make up a significant quarter of the $17 billion global recorded music industry. Yet, the music industry spent the year playing defense: legacy labels scrambled to lobby Europe to extend sound recording copyrights to 95 years, while publishers went to war with YouTube, briefly pulling down music videos over royalty rates.
While the traditional industry was bogged down in these reactive legal and pricing battles over iTunes and YouTube, Believe saw a completely different macro-reality. To Believe, the real headline of 2009 wasn’t download pricing or copyright extensions, it was the total dismantling of national borders.
Dismantling the old physical nightmare
In the twentieth century, “exporting” music was a grueling, physical challenge. If an independent label wanted to sell a record abroad, they had to physically manufacture CDs, cassettes, or vinyl, pack them into shipping crates, clear customs, and navigate a Byzantine maze of territorial distribution deals. Foreign label affiliates acted as strict gatekeepers; if an executive in London or Tokyo didn’t think a French hip-hop track suited their local market, the physical record simply never crossed the border.
Digital distribution destroyed this entire framework. Overnight, the complex patchwork of national distribution agreements became obsolete. A track uploaded to Believe’s system was instantaneously available globally, completely delivering on the borderless paradigm shift Believe had anticipated since its inception.
The beachhead: landing in the UK
International was key. That is because we knew that digital and technology would break the barriers and break the boundaries – that suddenly the market will become much more global.
Romain Vivien
Global Head of Music and President Europe, Believe
Yet, while digital distribution made crossing borders instant and seamless, Believe understood that you couldn’t run a global business entirely from a laptop in Paris. To truly maximize local talent, you still needed specialized eyes and ears on the ground to provide territory-specific insights and expertise.
In 2009, Believe opened its UK office. This was a massive strategic beachhead for three specific reasons: the UK was a top-three global music market, it was a hyper-aggressive exporter of global talent, and it gave Believe its very first operational base in an Anglophone territory.
“International was key,” Romain Vivien says. “That is because we knew that digital and technology would break the barriers and break the boundaries, that suddenly the market would become much more global. Even if we were mostly interested, since day one, on local artists, we knew that those artists could reach a wider audience faster. Then suddenly the game plan was international.”
First-mover differentiation
By deploying local experts ahead of the curve, Believe adopted an organizational model that differed from both the major labels and emerging digital competitors. While much of the music industry remained organized around distribution networks inherited from the physical era, Believe’s boots-on-the-ground approach allowed them to embed themselves directly into fresh, independent creative communities.
“We thought that if we were going there first, and before the competition, stepping into the market and building our local presence with local teams would create a differentiation,” explains Romain Vivien. “We would create a better understanding of the ecosystem and better access to the artist community, we would build trust, we would be able to help them understand and embrace the digital world, using our position as first movers. And that’s exactly what happened.“
This localized strategy wasn’t about imposing a homogenized global pop sound; it was about supercharging distinct regional cultures.
“We wanted to invest in the local ecosystem in every genre that would make an impact and could be relevant locally,” he says. “That was a big differentiator. To do this, we needed to step into those countries and invest locally.“
The Google method to standardize a global engine
To ensure these expanding local teams weren’t operating in isolated silos, Believe began building a unified global technology infrastructure. The goal was to build a system where any local office could instantly plug into a centralized powerhouse of sales, operations, and promotional tools.
This operational shift was heavily influenced by Romain Becker, who joined Believe in 2009, left for a three-year stint at Google, and returned to infuse Big Tech efficiency into Believe’s sales operations.
“I brought in some of the methodologies and some of the processes that I’d witnessed at Google,” he says. “It was organising our tech and our processes to be global. This was very unusual for a music company because traditional record labels had strong local specificities related to the physical market and related to regulations. But for us in the streaming world, that was not really applicable. Because of this, we were able to offer exactly the same service for any artist or any independent label globally. That was one of our specificities.”
Monetising the visual wave
We managed to support the international expansion in many territories, structuring the capacity for our sales teams locally to offer a compelling and attractive service to all independent labels and independent artists.
Romain Becker
Chief Product & Operations Officer
By deploying this standardized, uniform engine across local offices, Believe could execute cutting-edge digital campaigns simultaneously around the world. Because they weren’t bogged down in shipping inventory, their local teams could devote 100% of their energy to weaponizing the internet’s most disruptive features. In 2009, that meant mastering YouTube.
While publishers and legacy labels were locking horns with Google over royalty rates and pulling down videos in panic, Believe built a business out of organizing the chaos.
“We managed to support the international expansion in many territories, structuring the capacity for our sales teams locally to offer a compelling and attractive service to all independent labels and independent artists”, Romain Becker explains. “We managed to build and deploy innovative value propositions so that those clients, those labels, understood what value we could deliver to them. Part of those innovations was being the first company to embrace YouTube and the capability to drive higher and bigger revenue by structuring the entire presence of the artist there.”
Crafting an expansion strategy
To fully capitalize on this newfound borderless landscape, 2009 became the year Believe fundamentally evolved its business model. They shifted from being a pure digital distribution pipeline into a comprehensive, boots-on-the-ground artist services company. The strategy relied on finding local entrepreneurs who understood their own domestic markets and backing them to scale up.
“To accelerate this growth and diversification, we’ve done two things”, says Romain Vivien. “We moved from being a distributor to being an artist services company. From an M&A standpoint, we started investing into local businesses to accelerate our understanding of the market or access to the market and artist community, and also partner with entrepreneurs. “
As he recalls, the acquisition strategy was guided by two simple questions: “Which entrepreneurs would fit our DNA best? What entrepreneurs would take some risk with us in signing the new artist community and developing a local ecosystem with their entire diversity?”
The Local value premium
This strategic mix of organic growth and targeted local investments was built on a singular conviction: the real, untapped bounty of the streaming era belonged to regional acts, not exported Western pop stars.
“Our view is that 70% of the value of the music industry is in local artists in local markets,” says Denis Ladegaillerie. “For us, the core differentiator is that we’ve been breathing 100% digital, tech and music for the past twenty years.“
While this sophisticated global expansion playbook would be continuously refined over the next two decades, the core template was officially proven in 2009. By treating international music not as a physical product to be shipped, but as a borderless digital network to be plugged into, Believe permanently rewired how local talent could reach the world.
——————
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.
