RCA Records
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| RCA Records | |
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| Parent company | Sony BMG |
| Founded | 1901 |
| Founder(s) | Emile Berliner Eldridge R. Johnson |
| Distributing label | RCA Records (In the US) |
| Genre(s) | Various |
| Country of origin | US |
| Official Website | http://rcarecords.com/ |
| RCA Victor Records | |
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| Parent company | Sony BMG |
| Founded | 1901 |
| Founder(s) | Emile Berliner Eldridge R. Johnson |
| Distributing label | RCA Victor Group (In the US) |
| Genre(s) | Various |
| Country of origin | US |
| Official Website | http://rcavictor.com/ |
RCA Records is one of the flagship labels of Sony BMG Music Entertainment. RCA Records was founded in 1901 as the Victor Talking Machine Company, and the RCA initials stand for Radio Corporation of America, which was the parent corporation in the pre-BMG days.
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[edit] The RCA family of labels
RCA is the name of three different co-owned record labels. RCA Records is the pop music, rock music and country music label. RCA Victor is the blues music, world music, jazz and other musical genres which don't fit the pop music mold label. RCA Red Seal is the renowned classical music label with a reissue sub-label called RCA Gold Seal.
Defunct labels include budget labels RCA Camden and RCA Victrola.
Currently, Legacy Recordings Sony BMG's catalog division, reissues classic albums for RCA.
[edit] History
(For the company's earlier history, see Victor Talking Machine Company)
In 1929, Radio Corporation of America (RCA) purchased the Victor Talking Machine Company, then the world's largest manufacturer of phonographs (including the famous "Victrola") and phonograph records (in British English, "gramophone records"). The company then became RCA-Victor. With Victor, RCA acquired New World rights to the famous Nipper trademark.
In 1931, RCA Victor's British affiliate the Gramophone Company merged with the Columbia Graphophone Company to form EMI. This gave RCA head David Sarnoff a seat on the EMI board. Also in 1931, RCA Victor developed and released the first 33⅓ rpm records to the public. These had the standard groove size identical to the contemporary 78rpm records, rather than the "microgroove" used in post-World War II 33⅓ "Long Play" records. The format was a commercial failure at the height of the Great Depression, partially because the records and playback equipment were expensive. The system was withdrawn from the market after about a year. (This was not the first attempt at a commercial long play record format, as Edison Records had marketed a microgroove vertically recorded disc with 20 minutes playing time per side the previous decade; the Edison long playing records were also a commercial failure.)
During World War II, ties between RCA and its Japanese affiliate JVC were severed. The Japanese record company is today called Victor Entertainment and is still a JVC subsidiary.
In 1949, RCA-Victor developed and released the first 45 rpm record to the public, answering CBS/Columbia's 33⅓ rpm "LP". The 45-rpm record became the standard for pop singles with running times similar to 10-inch 78-rpm discs (less than four minutes per side). However, RCA also released some "extended play" discs with running times up to 10 minutes, primarily for classical recordings. (One of the first of the extended 45-rpm recordings was a disc by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra featuring Tchaikovsky's Marche Slave and Ketelbey's In A Persian Market.) In 1950, realizing that Columbia's LP format had become successful and fearful that RCA was losing market share, RCA Victor began issuing LPs themselves. Among the first RCA LPs released was a performance of Gaite Parisienne by Jacques Offenbach by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra, which had actually been taped in Boston's Symphony Hall on June 20, 1947.
In the 1950s, RCA had three subsidiary or specialty labels: Groove, Vik and "X".
Through the 1940s and 1950s, RCA was in competition with Columbia Records. A number of recordings were made with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, usually conducted by Arturo Toscanini; sometimes RCA utilized recordings of broadcast concerts. When the NBC Symphony was reorganized in the fall of 1954 as the Symphony of the Air, it continued to record for RCA, as well as other labels, usually with Leopold Stokowski. RCA also released a number of recordings with the Victor Symphony Orchestra, later renamed the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra, which was usually drawn from either Philadelphia or New York musicians, as well as members of the Symphony of the Air. By the late 1950s RCA had fewer high prestige orchestras under contract than Columbia had: RCA recorded the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, whereas Columbia had the Cleveland Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
In February 1954, RCA made its first stereophonic recordings, taping the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Charles Munch, in a performance of The Damnation of Faust by Hector Berlioz. This began a practice of simultaneously taping orchestras with both stereophonic and monaural equipment. Other early stereo recordings were made by Arturo Toscanini and Guido Cantelli with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Pops Orchestra under Arthur Fiedler, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Fritz Reiner. These recordings were initially issued on special stereophonic reel-to-reel tapes and then, beginning in 1958, on vinyl LPs with the logo "Living Stereo."
In September 1954, RCA introduced 'Gruve-Gard' where the center and edge of a disc are thicker than the playing area, reducing scuff marks during handling and when used on a turntable with a record changer.[1] Most of RCA Victor Records' competitors quickly adopted the raised label and edges.
The Toscanini stereo album, however, was never issued by RCA (it was a recording of the conductor's last broadcast with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, the famous performance in which Toscanini had a temporary loss of memory). It was not issued until 1987, when it appeared on compact disc on another label, and betrayed no sign whatsoever of the Maestro's apparent memory loss, probably because the reherasals had also been taped in stereo and portions of them were included in the final edit. Testament Records has issued a stereo recording of Toscanini's March 28, 1954, broadcast concert, taken from the RCA's experimental tapes of the rehearsals and actual concert.
In 1955, RCA purchased the recording contract of Elvis Presley from Sun Records for the then astronomical sum of $35,000. Elvis would become RCA's biggest selling recording artist.
In 1957, RCA ended its 55 year association with EMI and signed a distribution deal with Decca Records, which caused EMI to purchase Capitol Records. Capitol then became the main distributor for EMI recordings in North and South America with RCA distributing its recordings through Decca in the United Kingdom on the RCA and RCA Victor labels with the lightning bolt logo instead of the His Master's Voice Nipper logo. RCA set up its own British distribution in 1971.
In 1963, RCA introduced Dynagroove which added computer technology to the disc cutting process, ostensibly to improve sound reproduction. Whether it was actually an improvement or not is still debated among audiophiles.
In 1968, RCA modernised its image with a new logo, replacing the old lightning bolt logo, and the virtual retirement of both the "Victor" and Nipper trademarks. RCA Records reinstated Nipper to most of its record labels beginning in 1976 in countries where RCA had the rights to the Nipper trademark.
RCA has produced several notable Broadway cast albums as well, among them the original Broadway recordings of Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, the Mary Martin Peter Pan, Damn Yankees, Hello, Dolly!, Oliver!, and Fiddler on the Roof, as well as recordings of musical productions staged at Lincoln Center, such as the 1966 revival of Show Boat and the 1987 revival of Anything Goes. They were also responsible for the film soundtrack albums of South Pacific and The Sound of Music. The album made from the hit Julie Andrews film was (and is) one of the best selling soundtracks of all time.
In the early 1970s, RCA began releasing quadraphonic recordings, primarily of classical music, in the CD-R "Quadradisc" format which required a special cartridge, a four-channel amplifier, and four separate speakers. Since Columbia introduced another quadraphonic system, SQ, with electronic encoding that only required a special amplifer and the four speakers, the systems were in competition and were also non-compatible. The Warner Music labels also adopted the Quadradisc format, but they, RCA and Columbia abandoned quadraphonic recording within a few years; some of the RCA sessions were later remastered for Dolby encoding (similar to Columbia's SQ) and released on CD. This included Charles Gerhardt 's series of albums devoted to classic film scores by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman, Dmitri Tiomkin, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, and others, performed by the National Philharmonic Orchestra in London's Kingsway Hall.
In 1983, Arista Records owner Bertelsmann sold 50% of Arista to RCA. In 1985, Bertelsmann and RCA formed a joint venture called RCA/Ariola International.
When General Electric acquired RCA in 1986, the company sold its 50% interest in RCA/Ariola International to its partner Bertelsmann and the company was renamed BMG Music for Bertelsmann Music Group. BMG brought back the lightning bolt logo to make clear that RCA Records was no longer co-owned with the other RCA entities which GE sold or closed. The only RCA unit GE kept was the National Broadcasting Company. BMG also revived the "RCA Victor" label for musical genres outside of country, pop and rock music.
In 2006, Sony BMG merged its Broadway music labels, including RCA Victor to the new Masterworks Broadway Records.
[edit] Criticisms
In the 1970s the label let much of its catalog go out of print. This pattern affected its jazz catalog most greatly, followed by its classical music catalog.
In the compact disc era a small proportion of its jazz catalog has been reissued. (For example, Jelly Roll Morton albums were reissued; but they were removed from circulation in less than ten years.) Similarly, only a fraction of its vast classical catalog has remained available on compact disc.
In the 1970s the label pressed its popular, jazz and country records with a 'Dynaflex' technology. These records were unusually flexible. However, a high proportion of these pressings were warped when sold as new recordings.
After country singer Kenny Rogers left the label, RCA were accused of trying to ruin his career. Rogers signed to RCA in 1983 for an advance sum of $20 million (the largest deal ever in country music at that time) when Bob Summers was head of the label. Shortly after Rogers' first album for the label Summers was fired (for unrelated reasons) by RCA. Deciding it would make the label look bad for firing Summer if Rogers continued to be a major success -- his duet with Dolly Parton, "Islands in the Stream", had been one of the biggest hits of 1983 -- Rogers received very little support from the label during the next several years he was with them. Although Rogers and RCA parted ways many years ago the results of the conflict can still be seen today. RCA deleted all of Rogers' solo albums soon after he signed to Reprise in 1989 (taking the rights to those albums with him as RCA refused to keep them), with only Once Upon A Christmas (a 1984 album of seasonal duets with Parton) remaining in print.
[edit] Labels
- RCA Records Label Group: In 2003, BMG was reorganized in the United States creating the RCA Records Group which combined RCA Records, Arista Records and J Records with Clive Davis heading the reorganised unit. In 2006, Sony BMG was re-organized, and RCA became one of two main label groups in the United Kingdom. Head of the department was Craig Logan, manager of P!nk and former band member of Bros.
- RCA Label Group Nashville: Based in Nashville, Tennessee, it consists of the country music operations of the RCA, Arista and BNA record labels. Its official web site is at www.rcalabelgroup.com
- RCA Victor label group: The RCA Victor label group consists of the RCA Victor, Windham Hill and Bluebird labels.
- RCA Red Seal Records: The prestigious RCA Red Seal classical music label is now part of Sony BMG Masterworks.
- Other RCA associated labels: Colgems, Calendar/Kirshner, Metromedia, Chelsea, Windsong, Wooden Nickel, and Millennium
[edit] RCA Records recording artists
- For classical music artists, see RCA Red Seal Records
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Official RCA Label Group UK website
- Internet Archive: Command Performance (1942) - How RCA records are made, narrated by Milton Cross.
- Camden Building History
