The Black Keys

Fat Possum Records is an American independent record label based in Oxford, Mississippi. At first Fat Possum focused almost entirely on recording hitherto unknown Mississippi blues artists . Recently, Fat Possum has signed younger rock acts to its roster. The label has been featured in a New Yorker... article, a piece on NPR, and a 2004 documentary, You See Me Laughin. Founded by former Living Blues magazine editor Peter Redvers-Lee and Matthew Johnson in 1992, the label initially specialised in discovering blues players from the North Mississippi region, many of whom had never recorded before. At Fat Possum's behest some artists, particularly R. L. Burnside, released both standard blues albums and more "techno" albums, done in the style that would later be made famous by Moby's album Play. This led to a fair amount of controversy among blues purists, a group in which Johnson was largely uninterested. Many of the early artists for Fat Possum were picked with the aid of New York Times music critic Robert Palmer, who also produced a number of records for the label.
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Alive Naturalsound Records – also known simply as Alive Records – started in 1994 in Los Angeles, California, by Patrick Boissel, is an independent record label specializing in garage rock, punk blues, garage punk, psychedelic rock, power pop and blues-rock music. It grew out of... Boissel's association with the U.S. label Bomp! Records.
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V2 Records is a record label that is owned by Universal Music Group as of October 2007. The label was founded in 1996 by Richard Branson, five years after he sold Virgin Records to EMI. Ultimately, the label was owned 95% by Morgan Stanley and 5% by Branson because Morgan Stanley was the chief... financier of the company. Over the years V2 acquired Gee Street Records, Junior Boy's Own, Blue Dog Records, and Big Cat Records. The label also distributed many labels, such as Wichita, Luaka Bop, City Slang, and Modular. V2 now operates in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States. It was distributed in the US by BMG; however it left for WEA shortly after the formation of Sony BMG. Its headquarters were located at 14 East 4th Street in Manhattan, the former US home of Island Records, which was in the same building as the former Greenwich Village branch of Tower Records.
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