The Smashing Pumpkins

Constantinople Records is an upstart record label created by Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins. Little is known about the label and no official website or company exists. The US Patent Office's website listed the label as being trademarked by Corgan. When word of the label was made public, a... domain name was registered but no website ever appeared. After one year the URL had expired. The label was ultimately created to release the album by The Smashing Pumpkins: "Machina II" and the EPs that were associated with it, because Corgan's relationship with Virgin Records had deteriorated. Virgin had refused to release Machina and Machina II as a double album, and when Machina sold poorly, refused entirely to release the sequel. Since the band was breaking up at the time, Corgan decided to release Machina II for free download on the internet. Only twenty-five vinyl copies were pressed, and were shipped via FedEx to several prominent fans in the online community, with instructions to immediately redistribute it on the Internet free of charge.
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Virgin Records is a British record label founded by English entrepreneur Richard Branson, Simon Draper, and Nik Powell in 1972. The company grew to be a worldwide music phenomenon, with platinum performers such as Roy Orbison, Devo, Genesis, Keith Richards, Janet Jackson, Culture Club, Simple... Minds, Lenny Kravitz, The Smashing Pumpkins, Mike Oldfield, and more on their list of artists. It was later sold to Thorn EMI in 1992. Its American operations were merged with Capitol Records in 2007 to create the Capitol Music Group. Branson and Powell had initially run a small record shop called Virgin Records and Tapes on Notting Hill Gate, London, specialising particularly in "krautrock" imports, and offering bean bags and free vegetarian food for the benefit of customers listening to the music on offer. After making the shop into a success, they turned their business into a fully fledged record label. The name Virgin, according to Branson , arose from Tessa Watts, a colleague of his, when they were brainstorming business ideas. She suggested Virgin - as they were all new to business - like "virgins".
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Caroline Records started out as a subsidiary of Richard Branson's Virgin Records label during the early to mid 1970s. The label originally specialized in putting out budget price LPs by mainly progressive rock and jazz artists generally not considered to have a great deal of 'mainstream' or... commercial appeal, but were often however creatively of great interest. The first release was Outside the Dream Syndicate by Toni Conrad and Faust in 1973. The original label was a photographic style variation on that of the Virgin label's "Twins" logo designed by Roger Dean. Both the U.S. and U.K. branches of Caroline Records are subsidiaries of Caroline Music, which includes Caroline Distribution and is in turn owned by EMI. Caroline has or had a number of subsidiary labels including Astralwerks, Gyroscope, Caroline Blue Plate, Rocks the World, Scamp, and Passenger.
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