By 2012, a massive behavioral shift was tracking across the internet: music discovery had gone widescreen. While the traditional industry was still treating music videos as expensive marketing expenses designed to get onto television networks, a younger generation was using YouTube as their primary, interactive radio station.
This shift also revealed differing views of YouTube’s role within the music ecosystem. During the platform’s early years, many record companies regarded user-uploaded video services primarily through the lens of copyright protection and their potential impact on recorded music revenues. Believe, having tracked the video space alongside YouTube since their mutual birth year of 2005, saw the exact opposite: an additive engine channel for music discovery and audience development, complementing rather than replacing audio consumption and capable of unlocking massive digital revenues, especially in emerging markets where digital platforms were becoming the primary means of accessing music.
To formalize this bet, the company launched Believe Digital Studios, a dedicated video and channel management ecosystem engineered to treat visual content as an independent creator’s most potent weapon.
Turning video into a growth channel
We were really embracing YouTube […) because YouTube was contributing highly to the growth of some artists who couldn’t reach an audience through traditional media, like radio and TV
Romain Becker
Chief Product & Operations Officer
The strategy was simple: while much of the music industry remained focused on the implications of YouTube for copyright protection and recorded music revenues, Believe focused on mastering its inner working, investing early in understanding how the platform could support artist discovery, audience development and monetisation. Having recently returned to Believe after a three-year stint at Google and YouTube, Romain Becker was well positioned to help the company develop expertise around the platform’s rapidly evolving ecosystem.
“We were really embracing YouTube and not really taking a stance on the value gap because YouTube was contributing highly to the growth of some artists who couldn’t reach an audience through traditional media, like radio and TV,” Romain Becker explains. “We were happy to support artists who were not comparing what they were earning on YouTube with what they were earning on TV. It was a new route for them to get exposure and reach audiences. It also created an additional source of revenue that simply hadn’t existed before.“
This alternative lens allowed Believe to operate in a completely different creative territory.
“I understand the position of the majors back then to preserve value and the right value sharing,” Romain Becker notes. “But because we were not competing in the same space, we didn’t have to be really worried about it. We were creating new opportunities for artists who couldn’t reach visibility. We were more focused on really embracing and taking full advantage of YouTube, understanding the algorithm, investing with marketing on the platform and so on, rather than looking at how we could slow down the development of YouTube to retain money.“
Local eyes on global screens
To supercharge this visual offensive, Believe hired Gideon Mountford in 2012 as Global Head of Video. Mountford walked into an environment where independent acts and labels were already allocating up to 75% of their operational energy directly into YouTube to cultivate grassroots fanbases.
Believe’s organizational approach also extended to video. Rather than concentrating video expertise in a small number of global hubs, specialized video teams were established within each of its local markets, allowing them to work closely with artists and labels while drawing on shared technology and expertise.
“We needed to invest in technology, we needed to invest in people, and we needed to have the best understanding of how to utilize YouTube to help support the development of artists and labels,” Gideon Mountford says. “We put video teams on the ground in every market that we were operating in, which was very different at the time for our competitors who had a centralized approach, keeping everything in one or two territories.“
This boot-on-the-ground presence was essential for solving the platform’s core discovery variable: hyper-localized optimization.
“We needed to understand metadata and local language, so we needed to have someone in the local territories to be able to create value there and use technology“, he says.
Partnering with fans: the UGC playbook
One of Believe’s most disruptive plays in 2012 was rewriting the rules around User-Generated Content (UGC). As fans increasingly uploaded videos featuring copyrighted music to platforms such as YouTube, rights holders adopted different approaches to these uses. While copyright takedowns remained a common response across the industry, Believe saw these fan-made videos as free marketing syndication, using automated content ID systems to claim them, route the advertising revenues directly back to the artists, and treat the uploads as a massive organic promotional network.
“Our view was that we needed to embrace users being able to engage with that content”, Gideon Mountford explains. “We wanted them to be soundtracking with one of our tracks because that was going to help us create new audiences and engage the superfans who wanted to create a piece of content using an artist’s work in their videos. We wanted to create a positive experience for that and monetise it and this was very unique at that particular time.”
Long live the Queen
We would go into markets and say to labels and artists, ‘YouTube represents up to 80% of your revenue and you should work with us on it. Working directly, we had to show the value.
Gideon Mountford
President of Global Digital Business
The definitive proof of concept for this visual-first engine came from an unlikely source: rock royalty. While the band’s audio releases remained with Universal Music Group, their manager, Jim Beach, chose Believe to manage Queen’s global video rights, reflecting a growing interest in digital-first approaches to video distribution and channel management.
“Jim is a very forward-looking manager,” Gideon Mountford notes. “He’s always embracing new technology and looking at ways to engage new audiences. The synergies that all this created with our business was great. Our business isn’t a legacy physical business. It’s about digital, it’s about the future, and it’s about engaging new audiences. It worked remarkably well.“
By optimizing Queen’s metadata, organizing their channel layout, and monetising the massive wave of global UGC fan uploads, Believe transformed the legendary band’s digital bottom line, scaling Queen’s official YouTube channel past 1 million subscribers by 2014.
For Denis Ladegaillerie, the success with Queen validated a core tenet of Believe’s digital philosophy: on video platforms, discovery algorithms flattened the playing field entirely.
“Video completely equalized the economics of music discovery, “Denis Ladegaillerie notes of this transition. “The algorithm doesn’t care about the size of a legacy label’s check. It cares about engagement. For the first time in history, an independent creator’s view on a screen was worth exactly the same as a major label superstar’s.”
Armed with the ultimate case study, Believe’s regional teams went town to town, pitching independent communities on a new financial reality.
“We would go into markets and say to labels and artists, ‘YouTube represents up to 80% of your revenue and you should work with us on it,” Gideon Mountford reveals. “Working directly, we had to show the value… We were able to do that and to build our market share in those territories where YouTube was very much the leader in revenue. We were able to create huge opportunities for artists and labels to develop.“
By integrating video into its artist development model, Believe extended its role once again – from distributing music to helping artists navigate the digital ecosystems through which music was increasingly discovered, shared and monetised.
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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.
