www.musicweek.com INTERVIEWSTEPHENKING
As the physical format flounders, Believe Digital’s Stephen King wants to provide an indie route to market for ‘the A&R men of the future’
DIGITAL BELIEF
on the market is really staring to pay off… I look at how I can use one area to drive another. So our YouTube strategy is to make money from the platform but also driving sales elsewhere. We make sure our marketing teams are effectively linking up social media together.
There are still some YouTube sceptics… We’re not at all sceptical. YouTube is one of our biggest areas of earning. I’m more sceptical about how people use YouTube. We had an interesting thing happen in Paris recently where YouTube approached us to go and train a major company on how to use YouTube. That says there are certain areas of the business where we’re all catching up. As an aggressive independent we have knowledge
of certain parts of the market and we work them very effectively. We don’t have the major resources to be doing mass-market spends so every bit of social media that we use saves us money and saves our labels money. But some of the larger companies still have no really effective understanding of every area of digital online promotion.
Presumably artists on your roster are already pro-digital revolution… They’re not all pro-streaming. We still sign artists that say they don’t want to do streaming.
“We earn more money from streaming services than we do for download services. It proves the model works” STEPHEN KING, BELIEVE DIGITAL
DIGITAL BY TOM PAKINKIS
I
ndie distributor Believe Digital has gone through something of a growth spurt recently, both in terms of personnel and function.
Originally offering distribution solutions alone, the French company has now gone down the label services route, providing everything from social media strategy to synch. Music Week spoke to UK and USA MD
Stephen King about the growth of Believe the evolution of its offering and the state of the music industry at large…
What was the original idea behind Believe Digital and how has that changed? The company was started in France by Denis Ladegaillerie. He worked for Vivendi Universal and realised very quickly that a lot of the French independent labels didn’t have any digital distribution so he moved into that area. His philosophy was to sign the best content
owners and develop their content with them. We couldn’t replicate what he did in the UK because we
already had huge competition, not only from The Orchard and IODA but also PIAS, Essential, Cargo, Proper – there are loads of them. We had to find a way to work in the UK that allowed us to sign a lot of content and provide extra services. So instead of going for straight deals with huge content owners, we decided to concentrate on what I termed ‘the A&R men of the future’ – who are already great and still independent or who we thought could be hugely successful. We decided to put together teams that did digital
media, social marketing, sync, online promotion, trade promotion, trade marketing, YouTube monetisation... and build a package of services that allowed people to develop their business with us.
YouTube and streaming services have picked up pace now, you must feel that your early outlook
Is that frustrating for you? It’s very frustrating but sometimes you have to start working with them and then eventually you can show them why you should stream. Some of our artists make enormous amounts of money from streaming. I think it’s a very high-quality service that’s expanding exponentially and it’s generating a lot of money for the music industry in general. We earn more money from streaming services
than we do for download services. It proves the model works. The fundamental point is that if you don’t at least make your content available for streaming, I think you’re complicit in allowing piracy to happen. At least with streaming you’re making it available and doing what you can to say it’s there. Streaming is low cost and there’s no excuse for consumers to opt for pirated material if you can listen to it at very low cost.
What’s coming up in the future for Believe? Because we expanded so quickly in the UK, they’ve empowered me to do similar things in the rest of the world. I’ve just taken over Spain and Portugal and put an office in Barcelona. We’re opening in Rio and Mexico City, we’re expanding our operation in North America and we’re hiring in Australia and India. We’re looking at expanding our services in Scandinavia and we’re also looking at some acquisitions and partnerships in certain parts of the world to expand our global reach. We have huge offices in Paris, Germany, Italy
and the UK and then, after that, North America, which we’re expanding rapidly. Then we see the Spanish and Portugese language content sales expanding. Deezer’s just moved to South America so they feel strongly about it and we’re working there very effectively. The only country where we’re not entering with
such haste is China because it’s a very complicated market and there are some good people there already. We’d love to be there but would have to find the right partner to work it.
07.09.12 MusicWeek 25
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