Can the French Music Company Win in the United States?

On a bitterly cold, blustery Parisian evening, 17,000 people are packed into the Accor Arena on the banks of the Seine, writhing and moshing in unison. For these fans of the late French rapper Werenoi — the beloved MC who died suddenly in 2025 at the age of 31 after a meteoric and largely unprecedented rise to the top of the country’s music scene — it’s a mass catharsis, an opportunity to finally say goodbye after his untimely death left them reeling.

“It’s a mix between ‘I can’t wait’ and ‘What’s going to happen?’ ” says Henri Jamet, managing director of France at French music company Believe, while sitting in a cafe in Paris’ Pigalle neighborhood earlier that day. Jamet — who the day before had been named the No. 1 power player in French hip-hop by local magazine Booska-p — signed Werenoi to Believe’s AllPoints imprint in 2022 and watched him blow up from there. “It’s going to be a lot of emotion tonight. [Thousands of] people bought tickets without knowing what’s going to happen. I think they just want to hear the tracks all together.”

At the show, over a dozen of the leading lights of French hip-hop from the past three decades performed a mix of their own tracks and their recorded collaborations with Werenoi, while his DJ stitched together sets by playing Werenoi’s biggest hits to the jubilant young crowd. Interspersed, unseen footage played on the big screen from an upcoming documentary on Werenoi’s life that Believe helped produce and is currently shopping to streaming services, with scenes from his first-ever show in 2023, of him in the studio and on the road — an intimate portrait of a young man both coming into his own as an artist and struggling with the demands of fame and celebrity.

Werenoi had the No. 1 album in France in both 2023 and 2024 and ended 2025 with two of the top five — successes that helped to cement Believe as the dominant music company in the country, where it had four of the top five albums last year, including the top three. And the deep passion for him at the tribute show — from both fans and other artists — is emblematic of what Believe has aimed to create throughout its two decades in existence: local stars, in local markets, whose influence can extend beyond their roots and into the brightest lights of the industry, starting, first, at home.

Believe has spent 20 years building and cultivating these local scenes and has become a major player far beyond France: The company boasts leading labels and artists in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, India, Indonesia, Turkey, Brazil and Mexico, among others, with artists such as JUL, GIMS, João Gomes, Craig David, Adekunle Gold, Tinie Tempah, Grupo Frontera and Sault under the company’s vast umbrella. That success has validated a business model that has allowed the company to spend the past 20 years digitizing, distributing and promoting local music in local markets all around the world. The blueprint often involves going into emerging areas early — establishing business relationships with local labels and creating a pathway for traditional, physical-first industries to get their music online and build their business and market share in their own countries and regions.

“We invested a lot in technology, we invested a lot in product — we wanted to be able to distribute music faster and in the most accurate way, so that we could bring music to DSPs [digital service providers] quicker than our competition,” says Romain Vivien, Believe’s global head of music, who joined the company in 2008 after a lengthy stint at Virgin EMI. “And that’s exactly what we’ve done.”

Over the past two decades, that strategy has transformed Believe from an early digital adopter into one of the biggest, most consequential music companies in the business. Yet to date, that blueprint has not included the biggest, most competitive, most complex and fastest-evolving market in the world: the United States. But that is about to change. Believe is now looking to flip the script and establish itself as a major player in the U.S. music business — if it can.

It faces an uphill battle. The company is virtually unknown stateside but for two facts: that it owns TuneCore, one of the world’s largest DIY distributors; and that it was the subject of a $1.8 billion preliminary takeover proposal from Warner Music Group (WMG) in the spring of 2024, which turned heads among casual industry observers as to what, exactly, the company had built that was so coveted.

“Let’s face it: In the U.S., Believe is not a known brand,” Vivien says, sitting in a Parisian recording studio around the corner from Believe’s headquarters. “TuneCore is, Believe is not. It became a little bit more identified a couple of years ago, when suddenly someone wanted to acquire us, and so our name was everywhere in the press. And so the U.S. markets said, ‘Who are those guys?’ But this is not enough.”

For those who had been paying closer attention, though, Warner’s proposed acquisition seemed like a savvy bet on a player that had been blooming in the background. (For myriad reasons, it ultimately retracted the offer.) By mid-2024, Believe’s business had grown to more than $1 billion annually, with offices in 50 territories, more than 15 owned labels operating around the world and a robust label services business. It had also expanded well beyond its initial distribution roots into a full-service music company offering DIY distribution in the form of TuneCore, which it bought in 2015; label distribution and services for independent companies around the world; and artist development and artist services for those who wanted to sign direct deals with the company. In 2023, it acquired U.K.-based publisher Sentric, rebranding it Believe Music Publishing earlier this year, in order to add more services to its portfolio. (The publisher is Djo’s longtime home and just signed Janet Jackson.)

“I want to make sure that we are able to fully support the teams across the full stack of music services, because a lot of our artists are also writers,” says Denis Ladegaillerie, who founded Believe in 2005 and has served as CEO since. “We want to maximize revenues for our artists in all of the markets today. And we don’t think that’s the case with all of our competitors.”

Still, the United States is a different animal entirely. “The first challenge is to explain who we are, what we do, our approach to the business,” Vivien says of coming to America. “But honestly, that was the challenge everywhere else. The difference is, the competition is massive in the U.S., so we’re going to have to prove ourselves. It’s one thing to say we can do a better job than the others; it’s another one to demonstrate it.”

The company, then, exists as something of a sleeping giant from the U.S. industry’s point of view — one that is now beginning to stir. After years of false starts and delayed promises, Vivien and Ladegaillerie know the challenge that poses for them. As the company starts truly building out its efforts here, all that’s left to ask now is: Will anyone in America believe in Believe?

On a sunnier afternoon the day before the Werenoi tribute, Believe’s headquarters — located in a bright, contemporary building called Konect, in northern Paris’ 17th arrondissement — is bursting with energy. A ping-pong game can be heard somewhere off the lobby; a handful of people are playing foosball in the cafeteria; dozens of young employees are on the terrace, chatting and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. It’s a physical manifestation of a digital-first business and a galaxy away from where things stood for Believe two decades ago.

At the turn of the century, Ladegaillerie, a trained lawyer, worked at French media giant Vivendi as its chief strategy and financial officer for some of the first digital music companies in existence, including eMusic, mp3.com and Get-Music. That initial digital wave was much maligned by the industry and ultimately sued out of viability, but two lessons made a deep impression on Ladegaillerie. “As a user, I was very convinced that music would go digital, because it was higher value — you could have more music available,” he says, sitting in a bright, expansive office space on Konect’s sixth floor. “The second element was, mp3.com catered to a large space of musicians. And because it was the third-most-trafficked site at the time in the U.S., it was being used by major record labels to promote the releases of big artists, and in many countries independent, unsigned artists charted better than some of the bigger stars. And that drove the thinking for me around, ‘Digital music creates an opportunity for new artists.’ ”

In 2005, Ladegaillerie launched Believe, aiming to provide those unsigned, independent artists a way to reach the digital masses. Initially, the company consisted of three people in his Paris apartment, digitizing CDs onto hard drives and delivering them to online stores like those run by Apple, Google and Amazon — sometimes in person. “I had a motorbike at the time, and I would take the motorbike and get the hard drives to the local digital music services, and then ship them by mail to some of the DSPs,” he recalls. “That was where the technology was.” Network speeds were so slow that uploads often failed or took hours per album; even the most advanced phones only had enough space for a handful of ringtones. But the company — self-financed by Ladegaillerie for its first several years — found ways to make it work. “Our first server was in the toilet, because it was the most refrigerated place in our office space,” he says. “You had friction pretty much everywhere.”

Believe quickly gained a foothold in France, then steadily expanded, acquiring digital businesses in Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom and bringing on labels throughout Europe to help them with their digital distribution. But the company’s fortunes changed abruptly in 2012 with a phone call from Apple. “Oliver [Schusser, then vp of iTunes international] was telling us, ‘Apple is going to open in 56 new territories in December,’ ” Ladegaillerie recalls. “ ‘We’re not going to sign any direct deals with any artists or labels in all of these new countries. We need your help to be able to source content in all of these territories.’ ”

Apple’s move — selecting Believe and then-independents TuneCore and The Orchard as its sole distribution partners in the new territories — doubled the iTunes Store’s reach to 119 countries and moved iTunes’ availability from 27.1% of the world’s population to 61%, according to news reports at the time. And it sent Believe into overdrive. Within weeks, the company hired new heads of Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, as well as country-level leaders within those regions (almost all of whom are still with the company), mirroring Apple’s global expansion.

“We locked in our technology team and we told them, ‘You’ve got two months to translate all of our interfaces for labels to the various languages that we’re going to need to develop to be able to support our artists and labels,’ ” Ladegaillerie says. “I went through 12 to 15 meetings per day in all of these territories to understand the labels, who they were, what they were doing and then tell them what we were doing as a company and how we could support them.”

Following the DSPs around the world became part of the company’s expansion blueprint. “We looked at the five biggest DSPs: Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Deezer and YouTube,” Vivien says. “Any time two or three of them were opening and investing in a market, we said, ‘All right, that market is going to switch to become more and more digital.’ ”

“Over the last two decades, Apple and Believe have built a strong, trusted relationship rooted in our shared commitment to empowering artists and helping them reach audiences around the world,” says Schusser, now Apple’s vp of music, video, sports and international. “Believe’s innovative approach to supporting artists has made them an exceptional partner, and we’re proud of what we’ve achieved together.”

Believe also sought to educate players in local markets and the DSPs looking to enter them, as well as to fill in gaps where major labels had weaknesses. “[The DSPs and Believe] had the same goal: to have good local experts,” says Viktoria Siniavskaia, who Believe initially hired to oversee Eastern Europe and is now president of the Middle East, Africa, Eastern & Southern Europe and Latin America for the company. “Having local experts was key, because you can’t really promote the music if you don’t know what it is, the history, its importance.”

In 2015, Believe acquired TuneCore, the DIY distributor launched in 2006 that had helped democratize access to the digital industry for anyone willing to pay a small annual fee. The company aligned with Believe’s ethos of providing the indie community access to the digital landscape and complemented its main business of digitizing and distributing independent record labels. But just as importantly, TuneCore operated in the United States, giving Believe both insight into the world’s biggest market and scale to help it negotiate with DSPs.

“TuneCore helped us elevate our relationship with everyone,” Ladegaillerie says. “It’s much, much easier when we are having conversations with all of our partners now, because 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, not in sub 1 million. TuneCore was really critical for us in taking that step.”

It also helped get the company into markets that would have been traditionally more hostile to digital-first upstarts like Believe. “TuneCore is actually the third-largest player in terms of market share in Japan,” says Sylvain Delange, Believe’s head of Asia Pacific. (Japan, the second-biggest market in the world, remains around 60% physical, compared with 12% in the United States.) “Japanese labels have always been extremely conservative with digital, and Japan is a very, very traditional market on many levels. If you want to really make it big, it’s actually tough to stay fully independent. So our objective is to be able to bridge that gap.”

Still, though Believe had established roots around the globe and was pushing the industry toward further digitization, it had a key evolution ahead: transforming into an artist development company that could compete with the major players and shifting from providing access to the market to providing the tools to break through.

“At the time, we were not competing with major record labels,” Ladegaillerie says. “We were not in the artist development business; we were a distribution company, and the core of our value proposal was, ‘Your content will be available, we will pay you royalties associated with your music, and we will promote it and do all of this in a way that’s transparent, that’s respectful, that’s fair.’ ” Now, he says, “the ethos has changed.”

In mid-March, Vivien, Delange, Siniavskaia and more than 40 of Believe’s regional leaders gathered in Tokyo for an annual global leadership strategy meeting.

The four-day seminar, led by Vivien and president of artist services and label and artist solutions Elsa Bahamonde Bourgain, was filled with presentations and case studies from the heads of various territories around the world, discussions about strategy and industry trends and team-building outings — drinks at the Music Bar Cave in Shibuya and a team dinner at Gonpachi, commonly known as the Kill Bill restaurant. The seminar culminated in a closing party on the roof of Shibuya’s Sequence Hotel featuring five Believe artists from the region: Offo Tokyo, Pami, A.G.O., Sandei and Chameleon Lime Whoopiepie, the lattermost of which offered a delightfully strange, unforgettable performance, complete with technicolor visuals and Donnie Darko-esque rabbit masks for band members Whoopies 1 and Whoopies 2.

It was a poignant moment: IFPI was a week away from releasing its annual global music report, which would show that growth in the United States and other Western markets had slowed significantly, while emerging territories — particularly in Latin America, Asia and Africa — were finally arriving to the table and seeing huge upticks in revenue.

Believe, in some ways, saw this coming — and is well-positioned for the moment. During the company’s rapid expansion in 2012, it arrived in a dozen Asian countries at a time when the only digital business to speak of there was in ringtones, and educating local label leaders about the concept of digital music at all, much less its importance and viability, was paramount. “The biggest seller in Indonesia back then was KFC,” says Delange, who joined Believe during that period. “They would bundle chicken with CDs. For some artists, they would essentially sell their entire inventory through KFC.”

Initially, Believe’s mission in Asia was a familiar one: digitization. “We were participating in bringing to the world some content that has been unknown and completely locked in boxes, sometimes literally, for decades,” Delange says. “This is content that bears cultural value — it’s legacy, it’s history to some extent, so we had a responsibility to make it available.”

Now, those early forays into the region are poised to be a huge driver of Believe’s future. Already, the company’s bets have paid off with massive growth: Between 2020 and 2024, as the streaming music model fully matured in the West and began to gain traction in those emerging markets, Believe’s revenue exploded, growing 124% across that period to $1.05 billion in 2024 (the latest figures available), crossing a threshold that traditionally would have put it among the world’s largest music companies.

“Building a portfolio in Thailand or in Mexico takes time, and having a portfolio that is aligned with the market dynamics takes time, and I think everything came into place within that five-year period,” Vivien says. “We had done a lot of [mergers and acquisitions]. Physical was shrinking. The independent sector was more dynamic. The growth in streaming was super, super high. The numbers of subscribers within the DSP sector was also growing at a faster pace. And our artist services business started to pay off at a stronger pace.”

That artist services business — effectively a high-touch record label, with Believe signing artists directly — was the final piece of the pyramid that Ladegaillerie envisioned the company to evolve into: TuneCore’s volume at the base; Believe’s traditional label services business in the middle; and big artists at the top of their game at the peak. And it is what spurred Believe to add the services and offerings that would attract talent of that level and keep them within the Believe ecosystem as they grew.

Along with that growth, however, came some upheaval. In 2021, amid an unprecedented surge in new public listings in the music sector, Believe filed for an initial public offering, a move to raise more money for additional mergers and acquisitions but that ultimately underwhelmed. Ladegaillerie didn’t agree with it at the time, believing that it gave the company’s competitors access to information that helped them understand its business. And the move coincided with an industrywide lurch toward the distribution model: That same year, Sony, already the market leader through its 2015 acquisition of The Orchard, purchased AWAL for $430 million, while Universal relaunched Virgin Music Group as its flagship distribution engine, ultimately absorbing [PIAS] and Downtown Music under that umbrella, too. A slew of indie competitors also entered the space, many backed by private equity. Ladegaillerie says that going public was designed to help Believe “accelerate on acquisitions,” but that the amount raised “didn’t allow us to have a level of valuation that was at the right level” to do so.

Within three years, Ladegaillerie had mustered up the cash from institutional investors EQT and TCV to take the company private once again. (The experience “made us more mature as a business,” Ladegaillerie says.) Warner kicking the tires on an acquisition and then walking away — WMG CEO Robert Kyncl cited several reasons, including a too-brief timeline to conduct due diligence — also caused headaches by forcing Believe to open its books once again and led some to speculate that Believe’s tech was not as advanced as some had thought, though others said Warner walked away because the price tag was higher and scale was bigger than what it wanted. (WMG ultimately bought Israeli distributor company Revelator in March for a much smaller figure.)

And the company has also come under scrutiny due to TuneCore. Over the years, the DIY distributor has served as a breeding ground through which artists like Ed Sheeran, SZA and Chance the Rapper have started their careers — and where, increasingly, artists can remain to maintain and grow them. (In the last year, TuneCore artists won at the BRITs and Grammys for the first time, by way of Sault and Avery.Sunshine, respectively.) “It’s been perceived as being for earlier-stage artists, but we have a good number of artists who are making careers, or they have meaningful catalog on the platform, or they signed, went and had that [label] experience and then came back,” says Brian Miller, TuneCore’s newly minted chief business officer. “Distribution is table stakes. Now you need to get music heard, and we’re putting more and more resources to make sure that happens.”

But TuneCore has also become a lightning rod in the fight against streaming fraud, which WMG president of Europe, the Middle East and Africa Simon Robson recently called “one of the greatest threats of our time” and “far more damaging than people realize.” In a $500 million copyright infringement lawsuit filed against Believe in 2024, Universal Music Group alleged that TuneCore was “overrun with fraudulent artists” and that its DIY business model was “fueled by rampant piracy,” with sped-up and remixed knockoff recordings by slightly misspelled versions of Kendrick Lamar and Ariana Grande flooding it.

Believe strongly denied the accusation, and the two sides settled the lawsuit in April 2026. (The terms of the settlement were not disclosed.) And while the issue is in no way limited to TuneCore, the problem has been exacerbated by both AI (Deezer said in April that 75,000 fully AI-generated tracks were being uploaded to its service each day, and Apple said one-third of its daily uploads are AI-generated) and the difficulties in combating bad actors looking to dilute the royalty pool.

In response to the problem, TuneCore and Believe have tried to harness the collective power of the industry, joining with DistroKid, Downtown/CD Baby, Symphonic, EMPIRE, Spotify, Amazon and more to form the Music Fights Fraud coalition in 2023 with the goal of sharing data through a collective database to root out bad actors and stop them from hopping from distributor to distributor any time one bans their actions. Believe has also participated in Music Biz’s annual Trust & Safety Symposium (the third edition was held in January), where industry leaders have convened to discuss the fight against fraud.

“It has evolved to a level of sophistication where we discover new cases of what could be qualified as fraud probably every week,” says Romain Becker, chief product and operations officer at Believe. “It’s been a serious area of investment for us, and we’re trying to have a leadership position where we share and educate the rest of the industry on how to fight against this. But we need to collectively find solutions to address the issue and need people to abide by the same principles and the same rules. If we have one player in the room not playing with the rest of the ecosystem, it’s not going to [work].”

The problem is ongoing and will require further industrywide action to root out entirely — which not everyone is convinced will happen. (Historically, the music industry has often failed at collective action, with competition dooming consensus.) Meanwhile, TuneCore has continued growing, announcing last year it had paid out $5 billion in royalties to independent artists in its 20 years of operation and, as of this year, signing up more than half a million artists globally to its TuneCore Accelerator program, aimed at boosting artists and finding them new audiences. And as Believe eyes its big move into the United States, executives say that TuneCore accounts for 4% market share in the United States, which would put it alongside DistroKid and EMPIRE among the biggest non-major-affiliated music companies in the country.

“We demonstrated that we could do this everywhere else in the world,” Vivien says about the company’s approach. “There’s no reason why we cannot do that in the U.S. as well.”

Sitting outside a neighborhood bar on an early-April afternoon in Manhattan’s Seaport district, Thomas Maxwell is laying out his vision for how, exactly, Believe can do that.

Maxwell has experience in bringing a French distribution company to America. For the past decade, he served as head of U.S. for the Paris-based label distributor IDOL, becoming its first American employee in 2016 and steadily scaling its U.S. business. But IDOL, while a global company, was always intended to be a boutique, catering to a smaller clientele.

Believe, then, represented a far bigger challenge with far larger ambitions. “I was really impressed by some of the things they were doing from a technological standpoint,” Maxwell says. “They did the reverse of what most distributors were doing, which was open in key markets and try to grow from there. Instead, they focused on becoming a top player in developing countries and territories, which makes it, I think, a much more appealing option to U.S. artists and labels, because they have the global infrastructure that artists need in this global economy and global ecosystem.”

Still, the U.S. market is fiercely competitive. The Orchard alone commands a U.S. current market share of 10.96% through April 16 — far higher than any individual major label — while the indie sector as a whole by ownership has north of 44% of the U.S. business so far this year, much of which comes from labels distributed by major-owned divisions, according to Billboard estimates based on Luminate data. But that major-owned distinction is a big one, and is where Believe, as an independent company, sees a big opening: Universal’s long-gestating purchase of Downtown Music for $775 million, approved this spring, was fiercely derided by the indie music community. Several organizations launched a campaign last November against the deal, saying it “poses a serious threat to competition, diversity and fair access across the music industry.”

Believe executives feel that acquisition has created an opening for another independent player to enter the market, one that can match the bigger ones already here in terms of reach, power and possibility. “We’ll plan to compete on quality of service,” Ladegaillerie says. “It is no longer about access. Distribution, like artist services, has to drive success.”

There’s also the opportunity for new business, which is where Believe hopes to make its initial mark. “In the U.S., we’re still seeing new labels come to market very frequently. I’ve talked to four labels in the past two weeks that are either brand-new or about to launch, and that’s a very exciting thing, because other territories aren’t experiencing that,” Maxwell says. “The name of the game these days is much less about just the infrastructure that a music company can provide, but more about the artist services and the strategy and all of the extra ancillary things that artists and labels need.”

“We want to empower the next generation of A&Rs and executives who are building labels to become the future winners in label development of tomorrow,” Ladegaillerie says. “That’s where we think that we can carve out space.”

Two weeks later, over drinks at the swanky Midtown Manhattan hot spot Fasano, Az Cohen lays out his own vision for what that next generation will look like. Cohen, the son of industry legend and current global head of music at YouTube Lyor Cohen, has spent the past 13 years rising through the A&R ranks at 300 Entertainment, the label his father co-founded independently in 2013 that WMG acquired in 2021, most recently overseeing 300’s indie artist distro business, Sparta.

Cohen is the other major piece of Believe’s coming-to-America strategy: Moving forward, he will head up a joint venture, which he is calling AZTEC, that will serve as the sharp end of Believe’s U.S. pyramid, signing artists directly to a front-line imprint and hoping to bring those artists to the apex of the global music industry.

“Believe has incredible labels around the world who have proven themselves capable of moving culture, of being intimately involved in breaking artists locally, but also servicing them with deftness in a global capacity,” Cohen says. “So if I can provide another operator who cares deeply, who eats, sleeps, breathes and dreams music and the recorded-music business, and do so in the largest recorded-music territory in the world, it seems like a win-win.”

Cohen will have his work cut out for him: Artists these days have more options than ever, and Believe is not a known entity stateside. But he has advantages — a major one being, as he puts it, that he “grew up in this business.”

“I have had more conversations with smart, talented doers than most will ever be able to have, and I’m pairing that with my firsthand experience,” he says. “[What’s] always been true, regardless of the level of service expected, is that the only things that work are the things that take their unfair share of time, that you’re able to build a team around who authentically believes in what is possible.”

To that end, AZTEC has been working to sign its first crop of artists, using not just Cohen’s own network but also the vast amounts of data that Believe has access to by way of TuneCore and its hundreds of thousands of artists, one of the deepest pipelines in the business. And Cohen is looking to adopt a curated approach.

“Our aspiration is to build monuments,” he says. “We are not a technology business. We are a human company made up of people who care deeply about the art and the artists. What I’m trying to do is find great artists who make capital-A art, who want to have fun while they become the biggest, greatest artist in the world. That’s my job: building things that stand the test of time with cultural creators who want to build things that stand the test of time.”

But facilitating art that stands the test of time itself takes time, and Maxwell and Cohen are first focusing on finding the building blocks that have made the company so formidable around the world: its team. Believe executives know that overnight success does not exist. But if the company can carve out a formidable place in the toughest market in the world, it knows it can change its fortunes.

“You can’t really pretend to be a global music company without being significant enough in the No. 1 market in the world,” Vivien says. Adds Ladegaillerie: “It’s not a two-year game or five-year game that we’re playing — it’s a 20-year game. And so we’ll take our time. Ultimately, it’s all about talents: identifying and nurturing the next generation of talent and partnering with these new entrepreneurs. That is what we will seek to do.”

This story appears in the May 9, 2026, issue of Billboard.