Believe founder Denis Ladegaillerie and executive Romain Vivien decode the rise of their multibillion-dollar music company that is commanding 10% of the global digital market. Believe has successfully outmaneuvered the major label system. Billboard News explores why top musical acts like Janet Jackson, Cleo Sol and Russ utilize Believe’s business model to retain master ownership while leveraging a massive global infrastructure.

Romain Vivien
You can’t really pretend to be a global music company and not being significant enough in the No. 3 position in 12 to 13 markets in the top 20 markets in the world.

Denis Ladegaillerie
Our market share globally in digital music is close to 10%. Which means that when we are talking about doing specific things, they translate in tens of millions of dollars of value. We are now the No. 1 to No. 3 player in Asia. We’re now the No. 1 to 3 players across Europe and the Middle East. Now is the right time for us to start looking at North America. Just to give you a sense, when we started in 2005, the belief was, I think the Believe name and the belief first was we want to sign new artists and we want to provide access, and the market would create an opportunity for some of these artists to develop. So it was really artists first. And we believe that in a technological world could democratize market access. This was still a very heavy CD-driven world at the time.

Romain Vivien
In France, we were quite successful very, very, very early on for one single reason: We made a bet on hip-hop. At the time, no majors were interested by hip-hop anymore. If there’s one genre and one community or artist that’s going to switch to digital faster than any others, it’s hip-hop. Why? Because their demographic of audience is younger. Those will be the first adopter of digital and the streaming era and the YouTube consumption and everything. And second of all, they produce more music than any, any, any other. A pop artist releases an album every three, four, five years. A hip-hop artist, every six months. We need to stay agile because the ecosystem and the artist needs us to remain agile, and we need to be more agile than the majors because this is going to become one of our USP. We need to move faster, and we need to be more agile about it to be more adapted to what the artist ecosystem and the markets and the artist community need.

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