A whole working life in the music industry: Unlike Universal Music boss Lucian Grainge, who started out as a talent scout, or his British compatriot on the Sony Music side, Rob Stringer, Denis Ladegaillerie can't say that about himself.

"I come from the technical side of the business," says the 52-year-old Frenchman.

Trained at the renowned Sciences Po, among others, he initially worked as a commercial lawyer in New York.

Benjamin Fisher

Editor in Business.

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Around the turn of the millennium, many of his friends then switched from large law firms to Internet start-ups.

He in turn joined Vivendi and from 2001 acted as strategy and finance director for the digital business in the USA.

Universal Music was already part of the Vivendi portfolio after the French bought Universal Music's parent company, Seagram.

In mid-2001 they also took over the previously sued digital music platform MP3.com.

Today, the station describes Ladegaillerie as early digital musical education.

With the experience behind him, he finished the Vivendi episode and founded Believe with two comrades in 2005.

“Believe has basically been profitable since day one”

Listed on the Paris Euronext for almost a year, the company is now one of the leading providers of “Artist & Label Services”.

As such, Believe does not concentrate on exploiting the rights of a huge catalog and hardly makes all-round contracts with artists, but acts - as the name suggests - as a mere service provider.

This starts with pure (digital) sales and extends to individual marketing tasks or complete campaign management.

Depending on what an artist or an indie label needs and cannot or does not want to do themselves.

The digital possibilities in a market characterized by streaming make many things easier.

In 2005 things looked different.

"Initially, many did not believe in the digitization of the market," says Ladegaillerie.

At the time, former Vivendi colleagues basically took the position: “Personalization like mobile phone ringtones, that’s where the future of the music industry lies.” That was actually the dominant idea at the time.

He himself took three ideas with him from his Vivendi time: the prospective digitization of the market, the democratization of access through cheap and uncomplicated digital sales and, last but not least, the development of artists through new digital channels.

However, it would take until 2015 for the global market for recorded music to grow again thanks to the advent of streaming.

Strong sales growth, manageable margin

He initially financed the company himself, says Ladegaillerie.

Barring 2020, "where we've continued to invest despite somewhat slower growth, and 2021, the year that the IPO costs were incurred, Believe has basically been profitable since day one."

With such a balance sheet, it wasn't difficult to persuade TCV, which had already invested in Spotify or Netflix, to get involved in 2015.

There has never been a classic round of financing.

The American venture capitalist now holds around 41 percent of the shares, while Ladegaillerie holds 12.6 percent.

Believe is still growing strongly.

An increase of almost 30 percent to 577 million euros in sales in 2021 compared to the previous year.

A significantly stronger increase than the 18.5 percent that the global market for music recordings grew – as Ladegaillerie likes to point out: “We consider growth rates in the range of 20 to 25 percent to be realistic for the next few years, since our core markets are not yet so are strongly permeated like the USA or Great Britain.” In addition, one gains market share, since musicians wanted to take more matters into their own hands and have more control over their work.

In addition to the Asian region, the focus is on France and Germany as the most important individual countries.