Digital music company Believe announced plans for a Paris stock market listing on Monday, for which it is aiming to raise around 500 million euros ($608 million), according to reports in Reuters and Music Ally.
The company’s digital music brands include TuneCore, Believe Distribution Services, Nuclear Blast, Naïve, Groove Attack and AllPoints.
Believe cautioned that “the completion of the IPO is subject to the approval of the prospectus relating to the offering by the AMF, as well as favorable market conditions.” As noted by Music Ally, rumors about Believe being acquired by a larger company have circulated for months, so the tentative nature of the IPO may serve the purpose of pushing an acquisition forward.
Last year, the French publication Le Monde estimated the company would be worth 2 billion euros ($2.4 billion).
While it has not yet released a prospectus, Believe has published statistics intended to interest investors.
In 2020, it generated €728 million ($886 million) from what it characterizes as digital music sales (payments from digital music services and social media companies), which is up from €472 million in 2018.
In Q1 of this year, it made €124m, up 26% over the previous year.
Believe now works with more than 850,000 artists, a number that includes artists signed to its client labels, and its catalog generated more than 100 billion streams on Spotify and 375 billion YouTube views in 2020.
“This IPO project would enable us to accelerate our development and continue to pursue our profitable growth trajectory while achieving our mission to help build a better, more diverse, more respectful, more transparent and fairer future for all artists,” said CEO Denis Ladegaillerie.