Gramophone Company

The Gramophone Company, based in the United Kingdom, was one of the early recording companies, and was the parent organisation for the famous "His Master's Voice" (HMV) label. Although the company merged with the Columbia Graphophone Company in 1931 to form Electric and Musical Industries Limited (EMI), its name "The Gramophone Company Limited" continued in the UK into the 1970s, appearing on sleeves and labels of records (such as The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, vinyl copies of which bear the copyright notice "©1973 The Gramophone Company, Ltd.").

The Gramophone Company was founded in 1898 by William Barry Owen and Trevor Williams in London, England. Owen was acting as agent for Emile Berliner, inventor of the gramophone record, whilst Williams provided the finances. Most of the company's early discs were made in Hanover, Germany at a plant operated by members of Berliner's family, though it had operations around the world.

In 1898, Fred Gaisberg moved from the U.S. to London to set up the first disc recording studio in Europe; it was situated in Maiden Lane. Among early artists he recorded was the Syria Lamont, an Australian soprano whose single "Coming through the Rye" was one of the first ever issued. In December 1900, Owen gained the manufacturing rights for the Lambert Typewriter Company, and the Gramophone Company was for a few years renamed the Gramophone & Typewriter Ltd. This was an attempt to diversify the business model, in response to a series of lawsuits brought about by Edison Bell.

In 1900, the U.S. parent of Gramophone lost a patent infringement suit brought on by Columbia Records and Zonophone, and was no longer permitted to produce records in the U.S. Its hardware manufacturer, Eldridge R. Johnson, left with a large factory and thousands of talking machines with no records to play on them, filed suit that year to be permitted to make records himself, and won, in spite of the negative verdict against Berliner. This victory by Johnson, which would be used in naming the new record company the Victor Talking Machine Company he would found the following year, may have been in part due to a patent-pooling handshake agreement with Columbia. The agreement allowed Columbia to produce flat records themselves, which they began doing in 1901; Columbia's records had previously been cylinders.

...
Wikipedia