Odeon Records

Odeon Records
Founded	1903 (1903)
Founder	Max Straus Heinrich Zuntz
Genre	Various
Country of origin	Germany
Location	Berlin

Odeon Records was a record label founded in 1903 by Max Straus and Heinrich Zuntz of the International Talking Machine Company in Berlin, Germany. It was named after a famous theatre in Paris, whose classical dome appears on the Odeon record label.

Straus and Zuntz bought the company from Carl Lindström that he had founded in 1897. They transformed the Lindström enterprise into a public company, the Carl Lindström A.G. and in 1903 purchased Fonotipia Records, including their Odeon-Werke International Talking Machine Company.

International Talking Machine Company issued the Odeon label first in Germany in 1903 and applied for a U.S. trademark the same year. While other companies were making single-side discs, Odeon made them double-sided. In 1909 it created the first recording of a large orchestral work — and what may have been the first record album — when it released a 4-disc set of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite with Hermann Finck conducting the London Palace Orchestra.

Between 1910 and 1911 Odeon was acquired by Carl Lindström. On January 30, 1904, Odeon became a part of the Carl Lindström Company, which also owned Beka Records, Parlophone, Fonotipia, Lyrophon, Homophon and other labels. Lindström was acquired by the English Columbia Graphophone Company in 1926. In 1931 Columbia merged with Electrola, HMV and other labels to form EMI.

The Berlin Odeon plant recorded, processed, and exported records to many countries. There were extensive national catalogs for some of these countries: Greece, Scandinavia, India, all of Arabia, Netherlands, Estonia, Portugal, South and Central America, Rumania, Turkey, Hungary, China, Dutch East Indies, Siam, the Balkan countries etc. In the 1920s and 1930s about 70% of the German Odeon production was exported. Some Odeon recordings were leased to the American Okeh Records for distribution in the United States.

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