Andreea Gleeson & Romain Vivien present Russ with the 2025 Indie Trailblazer Award at Billboard’s Indie Power Players 2025. 

Hannah Karp: 

And to present our first award, I’m thrilled to welcome Romain Vivien, the Global Head of Music for Believe and Andreea Gleason, CEO of TuneCore.

Romain Vivien:

Hi everyone. Well, it’s a real pleasure and a real honor to be with all of you today and celebrate independent artists thanks to Billboard to welcome us. It’s quite a year for us. A milestone. We are celebrating our 20th anniversary. We also celebrate our 10th anniversary since we joined forces with TuneCore, and why we joined forces is exactly why we are here tonight to celebrate independent artists and to build something around them, to help them develop themselves with a lot of passion. So we share that passion, that vision. What I used to say is that we are actually entrepreneurs helping other entrepreneurs because being an independent artist today, trying to answer the questions which was raised is first and foremost, to have the mindset of being entrepreneur, to have the courage and the consistency to invest in his music. That’s what we’re trying to do. We are here to help them to do this. So I’m very proud because I took 20 years, I believe it’s 2000 people hungry for company. We operate in 50 different countries. We help artists emerge every day. We help diversity because I think independence, diversity comes a lot from independent artists, independent sector, independent legal. So that’s what we’re here to do, and we’re going to continue to do this for the next 20 years. So on this quick note, I’m going to pass the mic to Andreea.

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