EMI Records is the British flagship record label founded by the EMI company in 1972 and launched in January 1973 as the successor to its Columbia label. The EMI label was launched worldwide.
The global success that EMI had enjoyed in the 1960s exposed the fact that the company only had the rights to some of its trademarks in some parts of the world, most notably His Master's Voice and Columbia, with RCA Victor Records and the American Columbia Records owning the rights to these trademarks in North America. Complicating matters was the formation by American Columbia of its own operations in the UK by purchasing Oriole Records and changing its name to that of its then parent company CBS (the legal trademark designation bearing the full name of the parent company, "Trade Mark of Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc."), and becoming highly successful, a serious rival to EMI, in the UK.
EMI Records picked up the English Columbia roster and signed new acts that became global successes, such as Kraftwerk, Queen, Olivia Newton-John, Iron Maiden, Kate Bush, Sheena Easton and Robbie Williams (though some of these acts were on different labels in the United States, not EMI's Capitol Records).
In 2010, EMI Records opened a country music division, EMI Records Nashville, which includes Troy Olsen, Alan Jackson, Kelleigh Bannen, and Eric Church on its roster. EMI Records Nashville runs as a sister label to Capitol Nashville.
Australia's most prolific artist, Australian country music singer Slim Dusty, signed with the Columbia Graphophone Co. for the Regal Zonophone label in 1946 and remained with EMI until his death in 2003 - selling over 7 million records for the label in Australia by 2007.
Famous quotes containing the word records:
“Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)