Columbia Records

• 1. Introduction

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  Columbia Records was born on the 15th of January, 1889, in Washington, D.C., making it the oldest surviving brand name in the recorded sound business. A stenographer and lawyer named Edward D. Easton gathered a group of investors and named their company after the District of Columbia, where they planted their flag. What they started as a regional distributor of Edison phonographs would outlast Edison's own record label, survive two world wars, the Great Depression, corporate bankruptcy, and multiple changes of ownership. How does a company that once sold wax cylinders by mail become the home of Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, and Bruce Springsteen? And what does it mean that the same label that introduced the world to the long-playing record also nearly blew up the American music industry with a secret payola experiment?

• 2. Wax, Cylinders, and Disc Wars

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  At first, Columbia held a local monopoly on Edison phonographs in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Delaware. Its musical catalog in 1891 ran to just ten pages. The tie to Edison was severed by 1894, and from that point Columbia manufactured its own records and phonographs. The company's very first disc record was "In a Clock Store" by Charles J. Orth, listed simply as "No. 1".

  For roughly a decade, Columbia competed as one of the top three names in American sound recording, sitting between the Edison Phonograph Company's cylinders and Victor Talking Machine Company's discs. In 1903, Columbia contracted prominent singers from the Metropolitan Opera in New York for a Grand Opera Records series. Those artists included Marcella Sembrich, Lillian Nordica, Antonio Scotti, and Edouard de Reszke. Critics at the time judged the technical standard of Columbia's opera recordings as inferior to those made by Victor, Edison, and their European rivals.

  Columbia kept pushing the format frontier. After an initial failed attempt in 1904, by 1908 the company was mass-producing what it called "Double-Faced" discs, the ten-inch variety selling for sixty-five cents each. That same year, Columbia stopped making wax cylinder records, arranging instead to sell celluloid cylinders made by the Indestructible Record Company of Albany, New York. By July 1912, Columbia dropped cylinder phonographs entirely and concentrated on discs. The choice was final, and the split of the company into a records division and a players division sent founder Edward Easton to Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the manufacturing side was eventually renamed the Dictaphone Corporation.

• 3. Jazz, Blues, and the British Rescue

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  In late 1922, Columbia entered receivership. Its British subsidiary, the Columbia Graphophone Company, bought it back in 1925, and with the new ownership came a technological leap. On the 25th of February, 1925, Columbia began recording using the electric recording process licensed from Western Electric. The first electrical recordings were made by Art Gillham, known as the "Whispering Pianist". In a secret agreement with Victor, the two companies kept the new technology quiet to protect sales of older acoustic records.

  Louis Sterling, managing director of the Columbia Graphophone Company and originally a New Yorker, became chairman of Columbia's New York operation and oversaw a period of stability and creative growth. In 1926, Columbia acquired Okeh Records along with its roster of jazz and blues artists, including Louis Armstrong and Clarence Williams. Columbia had already been building a catalog of blues and jazz, including Bessie Smith in their 14000-D Race series, as well as a "Hillbilly" series. By 1927, sweet jazz bandleader Guy Lombardo had joined the label.

  Frank Buckley Walker, a Columbia executive, pioneered some of the first country music recordings during sessions in Johnson City, Tennessee, in 1928, capturing artists such as "Fiddlin'" Charlie Bowman. A novelty act called the Two Black Crows recorded "The Early Bird Catches the Worm" in 1926, and that single sold two and a half million copies. The years of the late 1920s also brought producer and talent scout John Hammond into Columbia's orbit, though his biggest discoveries still lay decades ahead. His connections through the British music paper Melody Maker helped the struggling label supply recordings to its UK counterpart, keeping the business afloat during dire economic times.

• 4. Depression, Shell Companies, and Bob Wills

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  The stock market crash of 1929 sent the entire recording industry into near collapse. By March 1931, Columbia's British parent merged into EMI, which created an awkward legal situation: since EMI absorbed the Gramophone Company, which was a subsidiary of Victor, Victor technically owned its largest American rival. To sidestep antitrust law, EMI sold off its American Columbia operation.

  In December 1931, the Grigsby-Grunow Company, makers of Majestic radios and refrigerators, acquired the American label. When Grigsby-Grunow declared bankruptcy in November 1933, Columbia went into receivership again. In June 1934, a company called Sacro Enterprises purchased it for $70,000. Sacro had been incorporated just days before the sale, and public documents contained no individual names. Many observers suspected it was a shell corporation set up by Consolidated Films Industries to hold the Columbia stock while its subsidiary, the American Record Corporation, actually ran the label.

  During these turbulent years, Columbia was effectively demoted to a secondary imprint releasing slower-selling material, including Hawaiian music and the still-unknown Benny Goodman. One bright spot came in 1936 when Columbia signed an exclusive recording contract with the Chuck Wagon Gang, a southern gospel group that went on to sell at least thirty-seven million records, many of them promoted through the Mull Singing Convention of the Air, a radio and later television program hosted by broadcaster J. Bazzel Mull. Columbia was also the only company to record southern gospel artist Charles Davis Tillman, a fortuitous act of preservation. Meanwhile, in the same Depression years, a mid-1930s Western Swing band called Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys drew ten thousand or more customers nightly to dance halls, making Vocalion, a label in the ARC family, their exclusive home.

• 5. CBS, Wallerstein, and the Long-Playing Revolution

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  On the 17th of December, 1938, William S. Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System acquired the American Record Corporation, including the Columbia label, for $700,000. That was ten times the price ARC had paid in 1934, a disparity that later sparked lawsuits from disgruntled shareholders. Columbia Records itself had originally helped found CBS back in 1927, before cashing out of the partnership and leaving only the name behind.

  Edward Wallerstein, a senior executive from RCA Victor, joined Columbia on the 3rd of January, 1939, as president of the CBS phonograph subsidiary, a position he would hold for twelve years. Wallerstein's singular obsession was hearing an entire symphony movement on a single side of a record. In June 1948, that ambition became reality when Columbia introduced the long-playing microgroove LP, rotating at 33 and a third revolutions per minute. CBS research director Dr. Peter Goldmark played a managerial role, but Wallerstein credited engineer William Savory with the technical achievement.

  The first LP in the twelve-inch format was Nathan Milstein's recording of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor, conducted by Bruno Walter with the New York Philharmonic, catalogued as Columbia ML 4001. The Library of Congress holds documents showing the label order for that record was written on the 1st of March, 1948, meaning Columbia was pressing LPs for dealers at least three months before the official launch on the 21st of June, 1948. The format's success persuaded Capitol Records to begin releasing LPs in 1949. RCA Victor, which had initially rejected Columbia's offer to share the new speed and instead launched its own competing 45 rpm format, announced it would release its own LPs beginning in January 1950.

  During the 1940s, Frank Sinatra recorded more than two hundred songs for Columbia, and his early LP reissue The Voice of Frank Sinatra, originally released on the 4th of March, 1946, as a set of four 78 rpm records, became the first pop album issued in the new LP format. That same album is also considered the first genuine concept album. The 1949 original cast recording of Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific with Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin was among the label's early prestige releases and helped Columbia establish dominance in Broadway cast recordings.

• 6. John Hammond and the Art of Discovery

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  John Hammond first joined Columbia in 1937 as a talent scout, music writer, producer, and impresario. His connections had already benefited the label in 1932-33, when, through his involvement with the British music paper Melody Maker, he arranged for the struggling American label to supply recordings to the UK Columbia label using the specially created W-265000 matrix series. Hammond recorded Fletcher Henderson, Benny Carter, Joe Venuti, and others during a period when the economy was so poor that many jazz musicians would otherwise not have entered a studio.

  Hammond's career was interrupted by service in World War II, and he had limited involvement with the music scene during the bebop era. When he returned to Columbia as a talent scout in the 1950s, his contributions became, by the source's own characterization, of incalculable historical and cultural importance. His list of discoveries and signings at Columbia included Charlie Christian, Count Basie, Teddy Wilson, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

  In September 1961, Hammond was producing the first Columbia album by folk singer Carolyn Hester. Hester invited a friend to accompany her on a recording session, and that friend was Bob Dylan. Hammond signed Dylan initially as a harmonica player. Dylan's self-titled debut album came out in March 1962 and sold only modestly. Some executives at Columbia nicknamed Dylan "Hammond's folly" and pushed to drop him. John Hammond and Johnny Cash both defended Dylan. Over the next four years, Dylan became one of Columbia's highest-earning acts, and his early folk songs were covered by Peter, Paul and Mary, the Turtles, and the Byrds, whose version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" became a pop breakthrough. In 1965, Dylan's decision to go electric produced "Like a Rolling Stone", and his late 1960s albums John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline became cornerstone recordings of the country rock genre.

• 7. Clive Davis and the Rock Transformation

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  When Mitch Miller retired in 1965, Columbia's pretax earnings had flattened to roughly five million dollars annually. Miller, a classically trained oboist, had dominated the label's A&R policy with a frequently stated loathing of rock and roll. His singalong album series had sold over twenty million units during the run of his NBC variety show Sing Along with Mitch, but that market was fading. The label's only significant pop acts at the time were Bob Dylan, the Byrds, Paul Revere and the Raiders, and Simon and Garfunkel.

  In 1967, Brooklyn-born lawyer Clive Davis became president of Columbia. His decision to attend the Monterey International Pop Festival led directly to the signing of Janis Joplin. Davis also kept Miles Davis on the roster, and Miles Davis's late 1960s recordings In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew helped pioneer jazz fusion. Barbra Streisand, who released her first solo album on Columbia in 1963, remained with the label through Davis's tenure and beyond.

  Simon and Garfunkel's story at Columbia carries its own momentum. Columbia producer Tom Wilson, inspired by the folk-rock experiments of Dylan and the Byrds, added drums and bass to the duo's recording of "The Sound of Silence" without their knowledge. The duo had already broken up, discouraged by the poor sales of their debut LP. Paul Simon had moved to the United Kingdom and learned of his hit single through the music press. Their subsequent album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme reached number four on the Billboard album chart. Simon agreed to write songs for director Mike Nichols's film The Graduate, producing the hit single "Mrs. Robinson". Simon and Garfunkel's fifth and final studio album, Bridge over Troubled Water, released in 1970, reached number one in the United States album chart in January of that year. The combined total sales of The Graduate soundtrack and the Bookends album exceeded five million copies.

• 8. Payola, The Network, and Sony

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  By 1979, CBS Records had pre-tax income of fifty-one million dollars and sales of over one billion dollars, yet the music industry was simultaneously experiencing an eleven percent drop in total sales, the largest decline since World War II. Dick Asher was promoted from vice president of Business Affairs to deputy president, charged with cutting costs. As he examined the label's expenses, he grew alarmed by the rapidly growing cost of independent promoters, known as "indies", who were paid to push new singles to radio station program directors.

  By 1979, a loose collective of independent promoters had organized themselves into a group known simply as "The Network". Historian Fredric Dannen estimated that by 1980, major labels were paying anywhere from one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand dollars per song to Network promoters, with the industry-wide cost reaching as much as eighty million dollars annually. Asher ran a covert experiment using the Pink Floyd single "Another Brick in the Wall", deliberately withholding payment to The Network. The result was immediate: not one major radio station in Los Angeles would program the record, even as Pink Floyd was performing sold-out shows at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena on their elaborate Wall Tour. Asher concluded that The Network operated as an extortion racket with possible links to organized crime. Walter Yetnikoff, who had become president of Columbia Records in 1975 and was known for his violent temper and shattering of glassware at the CBS building, dismissed the concern and defended the independent promoters as "mensches".

  The reckoning came in a different form. In 1988, the CBS Records Group was acquired by Sony, which renamed the parent division Sony Music Entertainment in 1991. The CBS Records label was officially renamed Columbia Records on the 1st of January, 1991, worldwide. Ron Perry was named chairman and CEO of Columbia Records as of the 2nd of January, 2018, and Jennifer Mallory was appointed as president in January 2023. The Walking Eye logo, originally designed by art director S. Neil Fujita in 1954 to depict a stylus on a record, became Columbia's global mark in mid to late 1999, though in Japan, Nippon Columbia continues to use the original Magic Notes logo to this day.