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| Paramount Records | |
|---|---|
| Parent company | Famous Music (1969–1974) |
| Founded | July 10, 1969 |
| Founder | Paramount Pictures |
| Status | Defunct, sold to ABC Records in 1974, catalog now owned by Universal Music Group |
| Distributor(s) | Self-distributed |
| Genre | Pop music Movie soundtracks |
| Country of origin | United States |
Paramount Records was a record label started in 1969 by Paramount Pictures (then a unit of Gulf+Western) after acquiring the rights to the name from George H. Buck. A previous Paramount Records, active between 1917 and 1932, had been unconnected to Paramount Pictures. The new Paramount label reissued pop releases by sister label Dot Records, which had recently become a country label and, in the process, had its entire pop back catalog deleted completely. It also released new albums from other pop musicians and soundtracks to Paramount films such as Paint Your Wagon , among others. Cast members of the Paramount Television series The Brady Bunch were signed, and the label issued several tie-in albums and singles.
After Gulf+Western sold its record label holdings to ABC (which happened to have aired the Brady Bunch TV series) in 1974, the Paramount label was discontinued in favor of ABC Records, which itself was sold to MCA Records in 1979. MCA itself had previously purchased Paramount's pre-1950 sound film library in 1958, currently managed by Universal Television subsidiary EMKA, Ltd. The Paramount catalog is now owned by Universal Music Group and managed by Geffen Records (whose founder, David Geffen, later became a co-founder of DreamWorks, which was a sister studio to Paramount from 2006 to 2008, and whose own record catalog is now owned by Universal).
On a side note, MCA continued to release soundtracks to some later Paramount films into the 1990s. Sliding Doors (1998) was the last Paramount release to have its soundtrack issued by MCA.
In 2015, Paramount Pictures revived the label as Paramount Music - a record label specializing in soundtracks from Paramount movies, with distribution by TuneCore.
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Geffen Records is an American record label established by David Geffen and owned by Universal Music Group through its Interscope Geffen A&M Records imprint.
Decca Records is a British record label established in 1929 by Edward Lewis. Its U.S. label was established in late 1934 by Lewis, Jack Kapp and Milton Rackmil, who later became American Decca's president too. In 1937, anticipating Nazi aggression leading to World War II, Lewis sold American Decca and the link between the U.K. and U.S. Decca label was broken for several decades. The British label was renowned for its development of recording methods, while the American company developed the concept of cast albums in the musical genre.
MCA Inc. (originally an initialism for Music Corporation of America) was an American media conglomerate founded in 1924. Originally a talent agency with artists in the music business as clients, the company became a major force in the film industry, and later expanded into television production. MCA published music, booked acts, ran a record company, represented film, television, and radio stars, and eventually produced and sold television programs to the three major television networks, especially NBC.
MCA Records was an American record label owned by MCA Inc., which later became part of Universal Music Group.
Mercury Records is an American record label owned by Universal Music Group. It had significant success as an independent operation in the 1940s and 1950s. Smash Records and Fontana Records were sub labels of Mercury. Mercury Records released rock, funk, R&B, doo wop, soul music, blues, pop, rock and roll, and jazz records. In the United States, it is operated through Republic Records; in the United Kingdom and Japan, it is distributed by EMI Records.
MGM Records was a record label founded by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio in 1946 for the purpose of releasing soundtrack recordings of their musical films. It transitioned into a pop music label that continued into the 1970s. The company also released soundtrack albums of the music for some of their non-musical films as well, and on rare occasions, cast albums of off-Broadway musicals such as The Fantasticks and the 1954 revival of The Threepenny Opera. In one instance, MGM Records released the highly successful soundtrack album of a film made by another studio, Columbia Pictures's Born Free (1966).
Dot Records was an American record label founded by Randy Wood and Gene Nobles that was active between 1950 and 1978. The original headquarters of Dot Records were in Gallatin, Tennessee. In its early years, Dot specialized in artists from Tennessee. Then it branched out to include musicians from across the U.S. It recorded country music, rhythm and blues, polkas, waltzes, gospel, rockabilly, pop, and early rock and roll.
Verve Records is an active American record label owned by Universal Music Group (UMG). Founded in 1956 by Norman Granz, the label is home to the world's largest jazz catalogue, which includes recordings by artists such as Jon Batiste, Diana Krall, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Stan Getz, Bill Evans, Billie Holiday, and Oscar Peterson, among others as well as a diverse mix of other recordings that fall outside of jazz including albums from disparate artists like the Velvet Underground, Kurt Vile, Arooj Aftab, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and many more. It absorbed the catalogues of Granz's earlier label, Clef Records, founded in 1946; Norgran Records, founded in 1953; and material which was previously licensed to Mercury Records.
PolyGram N.V. was a multinational entertainment company and major music record label formerly based in the Netherlands. It was founded in 1962 as the Grammophon-Philips Group by Dutch corporation Philips and German corporation Siemens, to be a holding for their record companies, and was renamed "PolyGram" in 1972. The name was chosen to reflect the Siemens interest Polydor Records and the Philips interest Phonogram Records. The company traced its origins through Deutsche Grammophon back to the inventor of the flat disc gramophone, Emil Berliner.
ABC Records was an American record label founded in New York City in 1955. It originated as the main popular music label operated by the Am-Par Record Corporation. Am-Par also created the Impulse! jazz label in 1960. It acquired many labels before ABC was sold to MCA Records in 1979. ABC produced music in a variety of genres: pop, rock, jazz, country, rhythm and blues, soundtrack, gospel, and polka. In addition to producing records, ABC licensed masters from independent record producers, and purchased regionally released records for national distribution.
Impulse! Records is an American jazz record label established by Creed Taylor in 1960. John Coltrane was among Impulse!'s earliest signings. Thanks to consistent sales and positive critiques of his recordings, the label came to be known as "the house that Trane built".
Hip-O Records is a record label that specializes in reissues and compilations. It is part of Universal Music Group. Established in 1996, the label has distributed releases from 'out of style' genres such as disco and early hip-hop music as well as publishing film soundtracks. The label's name is a pun on the name 'hippo'.
de Passe Entertainment was an American film and television production company run by entertainment executive Suzanne de Passe. The company was founded by Berry Gordy Jr., in 1968, as Motown Productions, the film and television arm of Gordy's Motown Records label. In 2008, de Passe and Madison Jones started a successor company, de Passe Jones Entertainment.
Famous Music Corporation was the worldwide music publishing division of Paramount Pictures, a division of Paramount Global since 1994. Its copyright holdings span several decades and include music from such Academy Award-winning motion pictures as The Godfather and Forrest Gump.
Greatest Hits 1976–1986 is a collection of hits by Elton John released in the United States only by MCA Records in 1992. It replaced an earlier compilation, Geffen's 1987 release Elton John's Greatest Hits Vol. 3. This was necessitated because of a shift in the control of copyrights and a resulting reshuffling of compilation albums.
Interscope Geffen A&M Records (IGA) is an American umbrella label owned by Universal Music Group. It currently consists of record labels Interscope Records and Geffen Records.
It's a Sunshine Day: The Best of the Brady Bunch is a compilation album by American pop group the Brady Bunch released on March 2, 1993 by MCA Records.
A&M Records was an American record label founded as an independent company by Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss in 1962. Due to the success of the discography A&M released, the label garnered interest and was acquired by PolyGram in 1989 and began distributing releases from Polydor Ltd. from the UK.
Longhorns & Londonbridges is a 1974 album by B. J. Thomas, released on Paramount Records, during the time when rights to the Paramount Records name were owned by Paramount Pictures. It is commonly misidentified as Longhorn & London Bridges.
DreamWorks Pictures is an American film studio and distribution label of Amblin Partners. It was originally founded on October 12, 1994 as a live-action film studio by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, of which they owned 72%. The studio formerly distributed its own and third-party films. It has produced or distributed more than ten films with box-office grosses of more than $100 million each.