Stacey Talbot's A2 Music Video Blog: Major Record Labels

There are four major labels dominating the music industry, there are,

universal
sony music
warner brothers
EMI

These are referred to as the 'majors' the majority of these are backed by conglomerates with stakes in other industries such as film, tv and electronics.

most 'majors' own or liscence a series of smaller subsidary companies in order to reach different kinds of audiences in different kinds of genre. These are reffered to as the 'major-independents' which are as follows,

Coloumbia
Island
Syco
RCA
Virgin

There are also a huge number of small companies with no or little financial connection to the majors, these companies concentrate on a small number of acts within specialised niches in the industry.An example of a highly succesful independent is Domino Records.

Sony Music reords was founded in 1929 in the New York State of America.

sony music also own major independents, some of them being EPIC records and coloumnia records.
EPIC records have recently signed Americas Meghan Trainor who had a hit single called 'All About That Bass'

Her hit single has got over 133 million views on you tube and she now has 90,000 twitter follows and is rising.

GUT records is an example of a small independent record lable it was based in Maida Vale in London and was formed in 1991 by Guy Holmes.Guy Holmes was head of promotions as Island Records and then created his own record label. The first song released was from Right Said Fred called 'Im Too Sexy' the song was a worldwide hit and reached number one in twenty eight countries. One of them being the US where the song stayed at number one for three weeks. The single sold seven million copies and their debute album called 'UP' went worldwide reaching number one in the UK and went straight to the top five in over twenty countries and sold another 4 million copies worldwide.The song then became famous for an advert advitising washing powder called daz.

The company also signed a worldwide artist Jessica Cornish know as stage name 'Jessie J' however the company went bust and sold its assets to 'Phoenix Music Iternational'in august 2008.