Aaliyah

Blackground Records is an American record label owned by entertainment attorney and artist manager Barry Hankerson and his son Jomo Hankerson. In 1993, Hankerson formed the label, and Aaliyah became its first signee. At the time, Hankerson was managing R. Kelly, and was able to get his label Jive... Records to distribute Blackground's releases. In 1996, Blackground obtained a lucrative distribution deal with Atlantic Records, just before the release of Aaliyah's second album, One In A Million. Often playing distributor hopscotch, in 2000, Blackground switched over to Virgin Records. One year later, it moved again, this time finding a home at Universal Motown Records Group. In 2003, JoJo was signed on Blackground and she is the youngest artist who signed on Blackground and first Caucasian. As of October 2009, Blackground will be distributed by Interscope Records, also part of Universal Music Group. In 2010, Blackground partnered with former Universal Motown Senior Vice President of Promotion Gary Marella to distribute his new label Roma Records. Their first signing is Jordy Towers, who formerly went by the name Optimus.
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Jive Records was an American record label based in New York City, operating under RCA Music Group. Jive was primarily known for a string of successes with hip hop artists in the 1980s, and in teen pop and boy bands in the late 1990s. The word "jive" was inspired by Township Jive, a form of South... African music and dance. Jive operated as an independently managed label until 2002 when Bertelsmann Music Group acquired the remainder of Zomba for US $2.74 billion, which was at the time the largest-ever acquisition of an independent label with major-label distribution. Zomba, Jive's parent company, was formed in the mid seventies as a publishing and management company on Willesden Street in London and their first client was a young Mutt Lange. Initially, co-founders Ralph Simon and Clive Calder wanted to stay away from record labels, choosing to focus on their songwriters and producers while allowing other established labels to release the material. Later in the seventies, Zomba opened offices in the United States where Calder began a business relationship with Clive Davis, whose Arista Records began releasing material by Zomba artists.
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Atlantic Records is an American record label best known for its many recordings of rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and jazz. Over its first 20 years of operation Atlantic earned a reputation as one of the most important American independent recording labels, specializing in jazz, R&B and soul... recordings by African-American artists, a position greatly enhanced by its distribution deal with Stax Records. In 1967 Atlantic became a wholly owned subsidiary of Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, now the Warner Music Group, and expanded into rock and pop music, signing Cream, Led Zeppelin, Yes and Foreigner. In 2004 Atlantic Records and its sister label Elektra Records merged into Atlantic Records Group. Craig Kallman is currently Chairman of Atlantic Records. Label co-founder Ahmet Ertegün served as Founding Chairman until his death on December 14, 2006 at age 83. The label also has a number of deals with previously independent labels such as Must Destroy and VP Records in Jamaica, home to reggae artists such as Sean Paul.
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Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has... its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music. Rock music also drew strongly on a number of other genres such as blues and folk, and incorporated influences from jazz, classical and other musical sources. Musically, rock has centered around the electric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with bass guitar and drums. Typically, rock is song-based music with a 4/4 beat utilizing a verse-chorus form, but the genre has become extremely diverse and common musical characteristics are difficult to define. Like pop music, lyrics often stress romantic love but also address a wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political in emphasis. The dominance of rock by white, male musicians has been seen as one of the key factors shaping the themes explored in rock music. Rock places a higher degree of emphasis on musicianship, live performance, and an ideology of authenticity than pop music.
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Rhythm and blues, often abbreviated to R&B, is a genre of popular African-American music that originated in the 1940s. The term was originally... used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly to urban African Americans, at a time when "urbane, rocking, jazz based music with a heavy, insistent beat" was becoming more popular. The term has subsequently had a number of shifts in meaning. In the early 1950s, the term rhythm and blues was frequently applied to blues records. Starting in the mid-1950s, after this style of music contributed to the development of rock and roll, the term "R&B" became used to refer to music styles that developed from and incorporated electric blues, as well as gospel and soul music. By the 1970s, rhythm and blues was used as a blanket term for soul and funk. In the 1980s, a newer style of R&B developed, becoming known as "Contemporary R&B". Jerry Wexler of Billboard magazine coined the term "rhythm and blues" in 1948 as a musical marketing term in the United States. It replaced the term "race music", which originally came from within the black community, but was deemed offensive in the postwar world.
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