Arcade Records

Arcade Records
Founded	1972
Status	defunct since 2001
Genre	various
Country of origin	Netherlands

Arcade Records was a British record company specialised in multi-artist compilation albums (often in the midprice or budget price ranges), founded in 1972. In the 1970s, it found itself in direct competition with K-tel and other compilation labels. In the 1980s, the original company was sold to Dutch entrepreneur Herman Heinsbroek, who expanded the company into a worldwide multi-media company.

Arcade Records was founded in 1972 by Laurence Myers, a British music industry professional who had been working in music management and production for various top British artists such as The Animals, David Bowie and the Rolling Stones. In the early 1970s he realised that many music consumers were hometaping their favourite songs in order to create a mixtape of current top hits or the best songs by one artist. Myers copied this trend by releasing multi-artist and one-artist compilation albums.

The idea of issuing several hit songs on one album was not new to the UK market, which had been flooded by cheap compilations like Top of the Pops on budget labels like Hallmark or MFP, most of which contained cover versions by anonymous artists rather than the original hit versions. Although these albums were very successful - three of them had reached number one in 1971 alone - Arcade decided to pick only original songs and artists for their releases.

Arcade relied heavily on promotion through TV and radio ads, an idea conceived by Myers' business partners (and his brothers in law) Michael and Larry Levene, who had made their fortunes selling kitchen appliances through TV commercials.

Arcade's first release was 20 Fantastic Hits, released in the summer of 1972. It rapidly rose to the top of the UK LP chart, where it replaced K-tel's 20 Dynamic Hits, which had been K-tel's first number one album. Despite this promising start, Arcade eventually only managed a handful of multi-artist compilation hits (fewer than K-tel had), while it had some success with its range of one-artist compilations. In the UK, it had four number one albums:

By the early 1980s, Arcade's UK division was close to dormant, while its international activities - most notably in the Benelux, operated by Arcade Records Benelux in the Netherlands - remained active and successful. In 1983, the head of the Benelux operations, Herman Heinsbroek, bought Arcade's international parent company and began to rebuild the brand.

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