Outside of Europe, the company has been investing heavily in Asia Pacific and Africa for the past decade, signing deals with local label partners — like Filipino label Viva Music and Artists Group, and India-based imprints Think Music and Panorama Music — and growing its on-the-ground teams. In Japan, the world’s second biggest recorded music market, Believe is “closing onto third place behind Universal and Sony,” says Ladegaillerie.
Over the next five years, much of the growth in the global music industry is expected to come from emerging markets like China and India, the world’s most-populous nations.
To Mulligan, Believe is part of a breed of “midsize, next-generation” music companies “carving out a new mold for what a 21st century music business is.” He identifies the 2015 acquisition of TuneCore, the New York-based distribution company, as a “crucially important” factor in Believe’s year-over-year growth, plugging the company directly “into what this new generation of artists want” and making “the future part of Believe’s DNA.
Despite the Russia controversy, Ladegaillerie says artists and labels sometimes choose to partner with his company over major-label rivals because “we are much better at developing artists in the digital world than they are.” The German duo — whose 2013 international hit “Stolen Dance” has more than a billion streams on Spotify — left Universal Music Group for Believe in 2021, as has the French pop/hip-hop artist“We used to develop artists, and then major record labels [would] take them away from us,” Ladegaillerie says. “In the past 18 months, what we have seen is that the tables have turned — we have seen more and more top artists come to us from major record labels.