Capitol Records

• 1. Introduction

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  Capitol Records was born on a golf course. Songwriter Johnny Mercer floated the idea of starting a record company while out on the links with Harold Arlen and Bobby Sherwood, then took the notion to Glenn Wallichs at his record store, Wallichs Music City. On the 2nd of February, 1942, Mercer and Wallichs sat down with Buddy DeSylva at a Hollywood restaurant to talk about backing from Paramount Pictures. What followed was the founding of the first significant West Coast record label in the United States - a company that would eventually own one of the most recognizable buildings in Los Angeles and shape the sound of popular music for more than eight decades.

  The questions worth asking about Capitol are not simply about who ran it or who recorded there. They are about how a scrappy California upstart challenged entrenched East Coast giants like RCA Victor, Columbia, and Decca. How a small label for children's records and jazz sessions grew into a global enterprise. And how a building designed to look like a stack of gramophone records became a landmark that outlasted every ownership change the company ever went through.

• 2. Birth of a Label

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  On the 27th of March, 1942, the three founders incorporated under the name Liberty Records, though by May they had amended the registration to Capitol Records. The first recording session took place on the 6th of April, when Martha Tilton recorded a song called "Moon Dreams" under Mercer's supervision. Within weeks, the sessions were multiplying fast. On the 21st of May, Freddie Slack and his orchestra cut three tracks, one of them with singer Ella Mae Morse: "Cow-Cow Boogie." That song became Capitol's first gold single.

  The company's first office opened on the 4th of June, in a second-floor room south of Sunset Boulevard. On that same day, Glenn Wallichs handed the company's first free record to Los Angeles disc jockey Peter Potter. A week later, on the 12th of June, Paul Whiteman's orchestra recorded "Trav'lin' Light" with Billie Holiday in the studio. Tex Ritter had already come through a day earlier, cutting "Jingle Jangle Jingle" for what became Capitol's 110th produced record.

  The roster those first months included co-owner Mercer himself, along with Jo Stafford, the Pied Pipers, Paul Weston, and Margaret Whiting. Capitol's debut album, designated A-1, was Capitol Presents Songs by Johnny Mercer, a four-disc set featuring Mercer, Stafford, and the Pied Pipers accompanied by Weston's orchestra. Beyond Los Angeles, Capitol maintained a second recording studio in New York City and occasionally dispatched mobile equipment to other cities, signaling from the start that the label intended to compete nationally.

• 3. Unexpected Sounds

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  In 1946, a writer-producer named Alan W. Livingston created Bozo the Clown for Capitol's children's record library. The voice behind Bozo was Pinto Colvig, who had supplied the voice of Goofy in Walt Disney cartoons. Mel Blanc reprised his cartoon characters from Looney Tunes, including Bugs Bunny, and also voiced Woody Woodpecker for Capitol recordings. Some Disney records were narrated by radio announcer Don Wilson. Notable children's albums from that period included Sparky's Magic Piano and Rusty in Orchestraville.

  Capitol also built a serious jazz catalog during these years, releasing Birth of the Cool by Miles Davis. Classical recordings followed, some issued in the 1940s on embossed leather-like covers in the 78 rpm format and later reissued on LP in 1949. Among those recordings were works by Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, Russian composer Reinhold Moritzovich Glière, and César Franck's Symphony in D minor featuring conductor Willem Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw Orchestra.

  Beginning in 1956, Capitol launched what it called the Capitol of the World series, a catalog that eventually exceeded 400 albums. Produced largely by Dave Dexter Jr., the series ranged from German Beer Drinking Songs to Kasongo! Modern Music of the Belgian Congo to Australian Aboriginals recordings. The series ran actively into the 1970s and sat alongside the label's growing roster of popular music, comedy records by Stan Freberg and Mickey Katz, and early rock and roll acts like Gene Vincent and The Jodimars.

• 4. The EMI Years

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  In 1955, British conglomerate EMI, formally known as Electric and Musical Industries Limited, purchased Capitol Records, paying $8.5 million for 96 percent of the company's stock. The deal ended a fifty-five-year mutual distribution agreement between EMI and RCA Victor in the Western Hemisphere, an agreement that dissolved in 1957. EMI moved quickly to build a studio at Hollywood and Vine intended to match its Abbey Road Studios in London.

  The acquisition opened new commercial territory. When Decca Records broke its distribution contract with Panart, the first independent Cuban record company, Capitol stepped in and contracted with Panart to distribute Capitol and Odeon records in Cuba. Panart records, in turn, entered the American market through Capitol. The result was that Capitol's export percentage climbed from 20 to 50 percent, a significant gain at a time when RCA Victor had dominated distribution of Cuban music in the United States.

  In 1957, EMI's classical label Angel merged into Capitol, bringing recordings by William Steinberg and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and Sir Thomas Beecham and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Around the same time, Capitol partnered with bandleader Guy Lombardo starting in the mid-1950s, eventually releasing approximately thirty recordings together through the late 1960s.

  In October 1979, EMI merged with Thorn Electrical Industries to form Thorn EMI. On the 16th of August, 1996, Thorn EMI shareholders voted to separate the two businesses, and the remaining media entity became the EMI Group. In June 1997, Capitol and Virgin Records absorbed EMI USA, which then folded.

• 5. The Tower on Hollywood and Vine

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  Architect Welton Becket designed the Capitol Records Tower, with Louis Naidorf, a young architect from Becket's office, serving as project designer. The thirteen-story building, completed in April 1956, was the world's first circular office building. Although no one planned it as a reference to the phonograph, the building's wide curved awnings and tall narrow profile call to mind a stack of gramophone records sitting atop a turntable. EMI commissioned the structure after acquiring Capitol in 1955.

  The building was nicknamed "The House That Nat Built" in recognition of Nat King Cole, whose success at Capitol helped finance it. It sits north of the intersection of Hollywood and Vine and serves as the center of the company's consolidated West Coast operations. The rectangular ground floor is a separate structure, joined to the tower only after the main building was finished.

  Inside, the studios were built to a precise acoustic standard. Walls float on rubber and cork inside a 10-inch concrete exterior, leaving a one-inch air gap for complete sound isolation. Eight trapezoidal echo chambers sit 30 feet underground, with 10-inch concrete walls and 12-inch concrete ceilings. Speakers on one side and microphones on the other allow engineers to dial in up to five seconds of reverberation. The first album recorded in the tower was Frank Sinatra Conducts Tone Poems of Color.

  In September 2006, EMI sold the tower and adjacent properties to New York-based developer Argent Ventures for $50 million. A controversy followed in mid-2008 when plans for a condominium complex nearby raised concerns about the acoustic integrity of those underground echo chambers.

• 6. Global Reach and Legal Battles

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  In 2012, the Universal Music Group acquired the recorded music operations of EMI, and Capitol's world headquarters returned to the Capitol Tower in Hollywood as part of a broad reorganization of the Capitol Music Group. Steve Barnett, previously at Columbia, was hired as chairman and CEO of the division.

  Legal contests occupied much of Capitol's energy in this period. The label sued Vimeo for audio copyright infringement after users were found lip-syncing to Capitol tracks on the platform. In April 2013, Capitol pursued ReDigi.com, an online company whose business model allowed users to upload digital music files for resale. The court found ReDigi had violated copyright law, rejecting the company's argument that the resale of MP3 files was protected under "fair use" and "first sale" doctrines. The court held that those doctrines applied only to physical items the copyright owner had placed into commerce.

  On the commercial side, 2014 brought Capitol to number two in market share, and the label won four categories at the Grammy Awards that year for music by Beck and Sam Smith. That same year, Katy Perry founded a label venture with Capitol called Metamorphosis Music, later renamed Unsub Records in 2016. In 2018, Capitol's electronic division Astralwerks relaunched and relocated its entire operations to the Capitol Tower. In 2021, Michelle Jubelirer was named chair and CEO of Capitol.

  In 2024, Capitol Records joined UMG's Interscope Capitol Labels Group. On the 17th of December, 2025, Universal Music Japan announced it would relaunch its own Capitol Records label for domestic Japanese artists, with that label launching on the 1st of January, 2026.

• 7. Capitol Beyond America

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  Capitol's expansion outside the United States began almost as soon as the ink was dry on the original incorporation. In 1949, the company opened a branch office in Canada. Capitol Records of Canada was formally established by businessman W. Lockwood Miller that same year. Capitol broke with Miller's company and formed Capitol Record Distributors of Canada Limited in 1954. After EMI's acquisition, the Canadian company was renamed Capitol Records of Canada Ltd. in 1958, when Miller's rights to the name expired.

  In 1960, a Canadian executive named Paul White established an A&R department independent of the American parent to find local talent. That department discovered Anne Murray, among others. Beginning in 1962, the Canadian division issued albums by British acts including Cliff Richard, Helen Shapiro, and Frank Ifield, and it accepted the Beatles well before the American company did. By 1967, the Canadian arm was distributing non-EMI labels including Buena Vista Records, 20th Century Fox, Disneyland, and Pickwick. The company name changed again to Capitol Records-EMI of Canada in 1974, then EMI Music Canada in 1993. In 2016, Universal Music Canada donated the EMI Music Canada archives to the University of Calgary.

  Elsewhere, Capitol Latin was founded in 1989 as EMI Latin before being renamed in 2009, then merged with Universal Music Latin Entertainment in 2013. Capitol Records of Mexico was founded in 1965 and passed through several names before landing under Universal Music México. Capitol Music Germany inherited EMI's German catalog before merging with UMG's Vertigo Berlin division in 2013 to form Vertigo/Capitol. The reach of a label conceived over a round of golf in California now spans continents under more than a dozen names.