Record Label Research

Columbia Record Label




 An Overview:

• Columbia Records has come a long way from its beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, although its product remains basically the same. From the 1880s to the present, the company has sold prerecorded sound. A music industry pioneer in both technology and content, Columbia Records continues operating as one of the four label groups of Sony Music Entertainment Inc. (SMEI), a global recording company.The other three label groups within SMEI are Epic Records Group, Sony Classical, and Relativity Entertainment Group. 
• Columbia Records originated in the late 1880s as the Columbia Graphophone Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut. The original company was built upon the experiments of scientist Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester A. Bell. Bell, a cousin of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, was an engineer. In 1886 the two received a patent for a wax-coated cardboard cylinder on which sounds could be recorded. Their machine, the Graphophone, made its official debut in Washington, D.C., three years later.​ 
• The relationship between Sony Corporation and Columbia Records dates back to 1968, when CBS, which then owned the Columbia label, joined with Sony in order to expedite its expansion into the Asian market. Twenty years later, Sony acquired the CBS Records Group. Sony Music Entertainment Inc., including the Sony division of which Columbia Records is a part, is a truly international recording company boasting more than 9,000 employees.   ​

 Their strategy:  

  

 

• Columbia's strategy for success, in one word, is "innovation." Since its inception, the company has been in the forefront of technological innovation. At the end of the twentieth century, as a member of the technologically inclined Sony family, this trend remained unchanged. Likewise, it continues its role as a pioneer in the music industry.​ 
• In 1998, in a market saturated with new, high-priced musical products, the company adopted a new strategy: the "developing-artists retail program." With this approach, prices for albums by lesser-known, newer bands would be reduced until a certain quota were sold. Once the albums passed the targeted sales threshold, the price per recording would be raised to that of better known artists. This strategy encourages consumers to try unknown artists without having to spend the same mount of money they traditionally would have spent on an established artist.​ 
• Don Ienner, president of Columbia, has attributed his company's success to its commitment to developing its artists, its careful selection of a new management team, and a more open-minded outlook. "Two years ago, I started thinking we needed a new face," he told Billboard in 1996. "I felt we needed to get people in here who believed as strongly as I did in the artists at Columbia Records and in Columbia Records itself."​

Their Products:

• Since 1994 Columbia Records Group has seen a number of chart successes. In 1996, the company managed to push the dormant band Journey back to Top 40 success. While Columbia continued to earn solid money with mainstay musicians such as Neil Diamondd, Mariah Carey , and Alice in Chains,  it also managed the successful debut of many new bands, including the Fugees, the Presidents of the United states Of America (which disbanded by 1998), dog's eye view, Nas, and Stabbing Westward. In addition to rock and pop music, the company boasts artists in many popular genres, such as rap, hip hop, country, and Latin.​ 
• At the end of 1997, Columbia Records released Diana, Princess of Wales: Tribute, a two-CD collection of recordings by some of the world's best known singers and groups. The collection raised money for The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, and recordings represented an industry-wide collaboration between major record companies and top international artists.

Logo and Branding

• The acquisition of rights to the Columbia trademarks by EMI (including the "Magic Notes" logo) presented the company with a dilemma of which logo to use.
• For much of the 1990s, Columbia released its albums without a logo, just the "COLUMBIA" word mark in the Bodoni Classic Bold typeface. Columbia experimented with bringing back the "Notes and Mic" logo but without the CBS mark on the microphone. That logo is currently used in the "Columbia Jazz" series of jazz releases and reissues. A modified "Magic Notes" logo is found on the logo for Sony Classical. 
• In mid to late 1999, it was eventually decided that the "Walking Eye" (previously the CBS Records logo outside North America) would be Columbia's logo, with the retained Columbia word mark design, throughout the world except in Japan where Nippon Columbia has the rights to the Columbia trademark to this day and continues to use the "Magic Notes" logo. In Japan, CBS/Sony Records was renamed Sony Records in 1991 and stopped using the "Walking Eye" logo in 1998. 

Ownership Separation 

• In 1931, the British Columbia Graphophone Company (itself originally a subsidiary of American Columbia Records, then to become independent, actually went on to purchase its former parent, American Columbia, in late 1929) merged with the Gramophone Company to form Electric & Musical Industries Ltd. EMI was forced to sell its American Columbia operations (because of anti-trust concerns) and the Grigsby-Grunow Company, makers of the Majestic Radio were the purchaser. But Majestic soon fell on hard times. An abortive attempt in 1932 (around the same time that Victor was experimenting with its 33​¹⁄₃ "program transcriptions") was the "Longer Playing Record", a finer-grooved 10" 78 with 4:30 to 5:00 playing time per side. Columbia issued about eight of these (in the 18000-D series), as well as a short-lived series of double-grooved "Longer Playing Record"s on its Clarion Records, Harmony and Velvet Tone labels. All of these experiments (and indeed the Clarion, Harmony and Velvet Tone labels) were discontinued by mid-1932.
• A longer-lived marketing ploy was the Columbia "Royal Blue Record," a brilliant blue laminated product with matching label. Royal Blue issues, made from late 1932 through 1935, are particularly popular with collectors for their rarity and musical interest. The Columbia plant in Oakland, California, did Columbia's pressings for sale west of the Rockies and continued using the Royal Blue material for these until about mid-1936.
• With the Great Depression's tightened economic stranglehold on the country, in a day when the phonograph itself had become a luxury, nothing slowed Columbia's decline. It was still producing some of the most remarkable records of the day, especially on sessions produced by John Hammond and financed by EMI for overseas release. Grigsby-Grunow went under in 1934 and was forced to sell Columbia for a mere $70,000 to the American Record Corporation (ARC).This combine already included Brunswick as its premium label so Columbia was relegated to slower sellers such as the Hawaiian music of Andy Iona, the Irving Mills stable of artists and songs, and the still unknown Benny Goodman. By late 1936, pop releases were discontinued, leaving the label essentially defunct.
• As southern gospel developed, Columbia had astutely sought to record the artists associated with the emerging genre; for example, Columbia was the only company to record Charles Davis Tillman. Most fortuitously for Columbia in its Depression Era financial woes, in 1936 the company entered into an exclusive recording contract with the Chuck Wagon Gang, a hugely successful relationship which continued into the 1970s. A signature group of southern gospel, the Chuck Wagon Gang became Columbia's bestsellers with at least 37 million records, many of them through the aegis of the Mull Singing Convention of the Air sponsored on radio (and later television) by southern gospel broadcaster J. Bazzel Mull (1914–2006).

Parlophone Record Label


Overview: 

• Parlophone Records Limited (also known as Parlophone Records and Parlophone) is a German-British record label founded in Germany in 1896 by the Carl Lindström Company as Parlophon. 
• The British branch of the label was founded on 8 August 1923 as The Parlophone Company Limited (The Parlophone Co. Ltd.), which developed a reputation in the 1920s as a jazz record label. On 5 October 1926, the Columbia Graphophone Company acquired Parlophone's business, name, logo, and release library, and merged with the Gramophone Company on 31 March 1931 to become Electric & Musical Industries Limited (EMI). George Martin joined Parlophone in 1950 as assistant label manager, taking over as manager in 1955. Martin produced and released a mix of product, including recordings by comedian Peter Sellers, pianist Mrs Mills, and teen idol Adam Faith.

Success:

• In 1962, Martin signed the Beatles, at the time a struggling band from Liverpool. During the 1960s, when Cilla Black, Billy J. Kramer, the Fourmost, and the Hollies also signed, Parlophone became one of the world's most famous labels.
• For several years, Parlophone claimed the best-selling UK single, "She Loves You", and the best-selling UK album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, both by the Beatles. The label placed seven singles at No. 1 during 1964, when it claimed top spot on the UK Albums Chart for 40 weeks. Parlophone continued as a division of EMI until it was merged into the Gramophone Co. on 1 July 1965. On 1 July 1973, the Gramophone Co. was renamed EMI Records Limited.

Regulation:  

• On 28 September 2012, regulators approved Universal Music Group (UMG)'s planned acquisition of EMI on condition that its EMI Records group would be divested from the combined group. EMI Records Ltd. included Parlophone and other labels to be divested and were for a short time operated in a single entity known as the Parlophone Label Group (PLG), while UMG pended their sale.
• Warner Music Group (WMG) acquired Parlophone and PLG in 7 February 2013, making Parlophone their third flagship label alongside Warner and Atlantic. PLG was renamed Parlophone Records Limited in May 2013. Parlophone is the oldest of WMG's "flagship" record labels. ​