French Music Giant Aims for US Domination: "We Need to Prove Ourselves"

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.”

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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, Ap

_Originally reported by [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/pro/believe-french-music-company-label-united-states-launch/)._