By 2015, the music industry was finally smiling again. After a brutal, fifteen-year downward spiral following the turn of the millennium, global recorded music revenues grew 3.2% to $15 billion. The real milestone? Digital music revenue officially overtook physical sales ($6.7 billion vs $5.8 billion), propelled by a massive 45.2% explosion in streaming that brought the global total of paid subscribers to 68 million.
The industry was reorganizing itself around this digital resurgence. In the summer of 2015, the IFPI standardized “Global Release Friday,” aligning music launches on the exact same day worldwide to flatten old physical territory gaps. By June, Apple Music arrived to challenge Spotify, racking up 6.5 million users by October, and by December, even The Beatles finally relented, uploading their catalogue to streaming platforms.
In the middle of this revitalized landscape, Believe was executing its own master plan. To truly lead the digital age, you couldn’t just work with established labels; you had to reach the massive wave of independent, Do-It-Yourself (DIY) creators recording hits in their bedrooms. In April 2015, already operating across 29 markets, Believe made its biggest power move yet: acquiring TuneCore, the powerhouse digital music distribution and music publishing administration platform for independent artists.
“The success of TuneCore, its deep commitment to independent artists, and the natural synergy between our services for artists, make this partnership a powerful force to propel artists’ growth”, said Denis Ladegaillerie at the time of the deal. “There is a tremendous opportunity for TuneCore and Believe to champion independent artists and their entrepreneurship, and together our focus will be to provide the best comprehensive services to a wider range of musicians around the world.“
Constructing the artist pyramid
With TuneCore, we wanted to address the DIY market. We did not have the capabilities to do that. We felt it was better for us to acquire these capabilities.
Denis Ladegaillerie
Founder & CEO, Believe.
The TuneCore union allowed Believe to finally secure the absolute base of its global talent pipeline. While the company had experimented with its own home-grown DIY service, Zimbalam, back in 2008, conquering the DIY market on a truly global, automated scale required a completely different level of technological infrastructure. Instead of trying to build an automated high-volume machine from scratch, Believe bought the absolute best in class.
“With TuneCore, we wanted to address the DIY market,” Denis Ladegaillerie reflects. We did not have the capabilities to do that. We felt it was better for us to acquire these capabilities.“
This acquisition unlocked a powerful, tiered business model where Believe could support over a million artists with customized solutions as their careers evolved.
“At the base, we have TuneCore, then Artist and Label Distribution in the middle, and then we have our artist services at the top,” explains Gideon Mountford. “We now have over a million artists in our ecosystem, and they are at different stages of their development.“
Flexible Contracts for a New Era of Success
In the modern landscape, where hundreds of thousands of new tracks drop onto platforms daily, there is no one-size-fits-all roadmap to hitting the charts. Success requires a dynamic structure that bends to the needs of the individual artist.
“The shape of success is different today”, notes Henri Jamet, Managing Director France at Believe. “Now you have hundreds of thousands of tracks every day on platforms, so success is having the proper strategy adapted to your segment and your profile. This is what we can propose, from TuneCore to an artist deal, from TuneCore to a distribution deal, from TuneCore to a licensing deal.“
Because TuneCore acts as an internal incubator, contracts can seamlessly shift as an act gains traction.
“We can propose and make your contract evolve, conscious of your strategy, your journey, and your timing,” notes Henri Jamet.
The Foothold in Japan
TuneCore is ahead of all the other independent labels in the [Japanese] market. We were present in Japan through our subsidiary TuneCore […]The Believe brand is new in the market. It’s only three years old because, before that, TuneCore was a more powerful brand.
Sylvain Delange
President, APAC
TuneCore is ahead of all the other independent labels in the [Japanese] market. We were present in Japan through our subsidiary TuneCore […]The Believe brand is new in the market. It’s only three years old because, before that, TuneCore was a more powerful brand.
This structural framework proved to be Believe’s secret weapon when expanding into Japan, the second-largest music market in the world. When Believe officially established its office in Tokyo in October 2023, TuneCore had already been running autonomously on the ground for years, giving the parent company an instant competitive edge.
“We had TuneCore and we had the blueprint,” says Romain Vivien of the expansion into Japan. “We had the technology and the interface as well, something we progressively built after the TuneCore acquisition in 2015. On one hand, it was leveraging our artist services business and leveraging the TuneCore artist community, so we could upsell them. We built the first 100% hip-hop dedicated label in Playcode in early 2024. The first signings to Playcode came from TuneCore.“
Today, TuneCore sits at number three in digital market share in Japan.
“TuneCore is ahead of all the other independent labels in the market,” says Sylvain Delange. “We were present in Japan through our subsidiary TuneCore which has been operating autonomously there for many years. The Believe brand is new in the market. It’s only three years old because, before that, TuneCore was a more powerful brand – and it continues to be a more powerful brand today – than Believe was. It’s changing fast, but that’s the situation today. The Believe traditional model is more recent, but the presence of Believe through TuneCore runs a lot deeper than that.“
This grassroots ecosystem proved especially dominant in the exploding domestic Japanese hip-hop scene.
“The reason we launched Playcode in Japan was thanks to TuneCore,” Sylvain Delange explains. “The reality is that TuneCore 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.“
Unearthing regional hits in India
A similar story played out in India. Rather than spending millions trying to force their way into the heavily centralized, film-dominated world of Bollywood from day one, Believe started using TuneCore in 2020 to discover hyper-localized, independent pop talent that the major labels completely missed.
“There were a couple of artists we signed directly from TuneCore to artist services,” says Vivek Raina, the Managing Director of India at Believe. “Primarily the two key artist markets were Punjabi and Hindi pop. We had enough scalable opportunities across hundreds of artists that we sign on TuneCore, and every year we pick up two, three or four artists who we can offer a high level of services. We have been doing this consistently with TuneCore.“
Everybody Starts at Zero
If you take Ed Sheeran, Lizzo, Angèle in France, Chance The Rapper and many, many others, they all started on TuneCore. Before being global stars, they all started on TuneCore. Every artist starts at the bottom and needs a partner to help them grow.
Romain Vivien
Global Head of Music & President, Europe
The underlying philosophy is that every global superstar has to start somewhere. TuneCore exists to ensure that an artist at the absolute beginning of their journey has the exact same distribution access as a major label star.
“If you take Ed Sheeran, Lizzo, Angèle in France, Chance The Rapper and many, many others, they all started on TuneCore”, Romain Vivien points out. “Before being global stars, they all started on TuneCore. Every artist starts at the bottom and needs a partner to help them grow and Tunecore is a fantastic platform and model to do just that.”
Because artists need to shift dramatically once they move past that zero level, Believe engineered the pyramid to be fluid, allowing acts to move seamlessly up and down between distribution and services.
Propelling the next generation
To add extra fuel to this pipeline, a few years later the company launched the TuneCore Accelerator Program, designed to inject marketing support and expert career management directly into the DIY landscape.
“We wanted to develop a program where we were starting to deliver additional services to the artists that were in this phase of needing additional and extra mile support, even in the DIY landscape,” says Elsa Bahamonde Bourgain. “We started adding these additional elements, with marketing support, with special experts helping them on how to manage their time, their career, and their projects.“
Ultimately, this program connects the dots across the entire global business.
“What we have done, very quickly, is to create this link with all the other business lines, from publishing to artist services, to Believe Label and Artist Services,” adds Elsa Bahamonde Bourgain. “What we do with artists is to propose to them to move from TuneCore to the other types of services that we’re offering to make sure that we can continue the mission that we have as Believe, which is to be one global artist development company. We make sure that we are the one proposing to the artist, when we consider it is the best moment, how to move to the different businesses.“
By the close of 2015, with TuneCore pulling in $36 million in Q1 alone and expanding its flag to the UK market; the acquisition proved to be a masterclass in full-stack architecture.
This acquisition completed another key layer of Believe’s artist development model. By connecting self-distribution, label and artist services within a single ecosystem, the company was able to support artists throughout their careers while adapting its services as their needs evolved.
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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.
