Columbia Records
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Columbia Records is the oldest continually used brand name in recorded sound, dating back to 1888. Today it is a premiere subsidiary label of Sony BMG.
History
Columbia was originally the local company distributing and selling Edison phonographs and phonograph cylinders in Washington, DC, Maryland and Delaware. As was the custom of some of the regional phonograph companies, Columbia produced many commercial cylinder recordings of its own. Columbia severed its ties to Edison and the North American Phonograph Company in 1893, and thereafter sold only records and phonographs of their own manufacture.Columbia began selling disc records and phonographs in addition to the cylinder system in 1901. For a decade Columbia competed with both the Edison Phonograph Company cylinders and the Victor Talking Machine Company disc records as one of the top three names in recorded sound. In 1908 Columbia introduced mass production of "Double Sided" disc records, with recordings stamped into both sides of the disc.
In July of 1912 Columbia decided to concentrate exclusively on disc records, and stopped recording new cylinder records and manufacturing cylinder phonographs, although they continued pressing and selling cylinder records from their back catalogue for a year or two more.
In early 1925 Columbia began recording with the new electric recording process licensed from Western Electric. In a secret agreement with Victor, both companies did not make the new recording technology public knowledge for some months, in order not to hurt sales of their existing acoustically recorded catalogue while a new electrically recorded catalogue was being built. In 1926, Columbia acquired Okeh Records. In October 1928, Columbia executive Frank Buckley Walker pioneered some of the first country music or "hillbilly" genre recordings in Johnson City, Tennessee including artists such as Clarence Green and the legendary fiddler and entertainer, Charlie Bowman.
In 1931, the English Columbia Graphophone Company merged with the Gramophone Company to form Electric & Musical Industries Ltd. (EMI). EMI was forced to sell its American Columbia operations because of anti-trust concerns to the American Record Corporation (ARC).
ARC, including the Columbia label in the USA, was bought by Columbia Broadcasting System in 1938 for US$700,000. CBS was originally co-founded by Columbia Records. The Columbia trademark from this point until the late 1950s was two overlapping circles with the Magic Notes in the left circle and a CBS microphone in the right circle.
In 1948 Columbia introduced the Long Playing microgroove (LP) record (sometimes in early advertisements Lp) format, rotating at 33⅓ revolutions per minute, which became the standard for the gramophone record for half a century. In 1951, Columbia USA severed its decades-long distribution arrangement with EMI and signed a distribution deal with Philips Records to market Columbia recordings outside North America. EMI continued to distribute Okeh and later Epic label recordings for several years into the 1960s.
Columbia became the most successful record company in the 1950s when they hired impresario Mitch Miller away from the Mercury label. Miller quickly signed on Mercury's biggest artist at the time, Frankie Laine, and discovered several of the decade's biggest recording stars including Tony Bennett, Guy Mitchell, Johnnie Ray, The Four Lads, Rosemary Clooney and Johnny Mathis. In 1953, CBS formed Columbia's sister label Epic Records.
In 1955, Columbia USA introduced its Walking Eye logo that actually depicts a stylus (the legs) on a record (the eye). The logo was modified in 1960 to the familiar one still used today and replaced the notes and mike logo. In 1961, CBS ended its arrangement with Philips Records and formed its own international organization, CBS Records, which released Columbia recordings outside the USA and Canada on the CBS label. When Epic's distribution deal with EMI expired, CBS Records distributed Epic recordings on the Epic label outside North America as well. Epic distributed Ode Records between 1967-1969 and between 1976-1978. In 1983 CBS Records manufactured Thriller the biggest-selling album ever until The Eagles Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975 surpassed it. Both albums have sold over 26 million copies.
In 1988 CBS Records was acquired by Sony, who re-christened the parent division Sony Music Entertainment in 1991. As Sony only had a temporary license on the CBS Records name, it then acquired the rights to the Columbia trademarks outside the U.S., Canada and Japan (Columbia Graphophone) from EMI, which generally had not been used by them since the 1960s.
Sony merged its music division with Bertelsmann AG's BMG unit in 2004; the combined company, Sony BMG, continues to use the Columbia Records name and Walking Eye logo in all markets except Japan (where that division is called Sony Records and is still fully owned by Sony). In Japan, the trademark (Magic Notes) is still held by the former Nippon Columbia, now called Columbia Music Entertainment. Sony Music uses a modified version of the Magic Notes trademark for the logo of its Sony Classical label.
Previously affiliated labels
- Def Jam Recordings (1985-1993) (under Columbia Records)
- Tabu Records (1980-1990) (under Epic Associated Labels)
- So So Def Recordings (1993-2003) (under Columbia Records)
- Jet Records (under Epic Records)
- Loud Records (1999–2002) (under Columbia Records)
- 550 Music (under Epic Records)
See also
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