IDOL founder Pascal Bittard has addressed misconceptions about the independent distribution and services company, as it looks to its future in its 20th anniversary year.
Speaking in the August edition of Music Week, the president of the Paris-headquartered company said that its operations will soon ramp up outside of the capital.
“We’re an international company based in France, but the leverage and what we develop in the next year will be much more outside of France than in it,” he said.
That’s in no small part due to IDOL’s expansion success. Revenue generated from US consumption of IDOL-distributed music, for example, has seen a 50% increase over the past five years. North America now accounts for nearly a third of the company’s global revenue, which surpassed $50 million for the first time in 2025.
Bittard stressed that a common misconception about IDOL is that it has more limited scope, scale and ability than first thought.
“We are a very small, but very international company of 70 employees,” he told Music Week. “Often, people think we’re much smaller than we are and therefore less capable. But it means we’re more agile. We can handle very big artist releases: we have the teams, the expertise, the network... All the capacity.”
Despite that future-facing ambition, the company, Bittard said, must also look to its past triumphs building a nimble, sustainable business.
Bittard, who was formerly head of Sony Music France’s indie label distribution department, has reaped the rewards of weathering the storm of launching IDOL in 2006. That was a “very risky” period in which to found and self-finance an independent music company, while the download era gave rise to streaming.
But his decisions at the time proved invaluable in providing him with the freedom and capability to retain IDOL’s original independent spirit.
“Of course, you couldn’t be sure how the market would develop, so we were pioneers,” he said, referencing the fact that IDOL was one of a handful of self-financed indie distributors at the time – and still is today. “It was a very fast-growing market.”
I’d like to avoid selling IDOL to another distributor because it doesn’t make sense
Pascal Bittard
“[It was] an environment where major companies were less and less able to sign artist deals because the artists wanted to have their masters and, sometimes, even their own label,” Bittard continued.
“So the major companies signed more and more licence and distribution deals. We didn’t go into this to compete with the majors; they came in later to compete with us in the distribution field. At the same time, all these newcomers like us – Believe, The Orchard and AWAL – arrived, but these companies had a lot of money. And when you have a lot of money, you need market share, you need growth."
He added: “We’ve overcome the challenges by being unique. Thanks to that, we’ve made a living. I didn’t want to raise money; I wanted to be independent. If we were only fighting with advances and big muscles, we’d have lost. It has been difficult, but we’ve been profitable from the start.”
And, as for further down the line, Bittard revealed that when he eventually comes to sell the company, he would rather not allow another distributor to take the reins.
“For the moment, IDOL will not be acquired by anybody. When I want to retire, I will have to sell the company. When that day comes, I’d like to avoid selling to another distributor, because that doesn’t make sense,” he said.
“Perhaps I could find a company that has no distribution solutions, and which would make IDOL, my staff and my distributed labels sustainable," he added. "I wouldn’t want a situation where a company buys the contract and the technology and then, after five years, there’s nothing left. I’d like to avoid that. I’d want the best solution for the future of the company, even when it’s no longer mine.”
Subscribers can read the full interview with Bittard in the new issue of Music Week or online here.
