Claudio Abbado

Philips Records is a record label that was founded by Dutch electronics company Philips. It was started by "Philips Phonographische Industrie" in 1950. Recordings were made with popular artists of various nationalities and also with classical artists from Germany, France and Holland. Philips also... distributed recordings made by the US Columbia Records on the European continent. After the separation of English Columbia and American Columbia by the end of 1954, Philips also started distributing original Columbia recordings on the Philips label in Great Britain. In the late 1950s Philips created a subsidiary label, Fontana Records, and helped American Columbia Records form CBS Records in 1961, after Columbia formed its own international operations, adopting the name of its then parent CBS. In 1962 Philips Records and Deutsche Grammophon were linked into the Gramophon-Philips Group joint venture , which later became PolyGram. In 1961, after Philips lost its North American distribution deal with Columbia Records, it entered an exchange agreement with Mercury Records. A year later, Philips' U.S. affiliate Consolidated Electronics Industries Corp.
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Sony Records is a record label courtesy of Columbia, Epic, American Recordings. It has many divisions, including the preceding. As with other labels, other divisions may be region or genre-specific. Other divisions of Sony include Harmony Records. This label first founded in 1988.

PolyGram was the name of the major label recording company started by Philips as a holding company for its music interests in 1945. In 1999 it was sold to Seagram and merged into Universal Music Group. In 1929, Decca Records licensed record shop owner H.W. van Zoelen as a distributor in the... Netherlands. By 1931, his company Hollandsche Decca Distributie had become exclusive Decca distributor for all of the Netherlands and its colonies. Over the course of the 1930s, HDD put together its own facilities for A&R, recording and manufacture. HDD was commercially successful during World War II because of the absence of American and British competition. Van Zoelen wanted to sell to Philips so that HDD would have sufficient financial backing when their major competitors returned after the war. This led Philips to buy HDD in 1942.
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