PolyGram Group Distribution
 |
|
| Industry |
Music Film Entertainment |
|---|---|
| Fate | Sold to Seagram and merged into MCA Inc. creating Universal Studios / Universal Music Group. |
| Founded | 1962 (as Grammophon-Philips Group) (GPG), a joint venture of Philips and Siemens |
| Founder | Polydor and Deutsche Grammophon |
| Defunct | 1998 |
| Headquarters | Baarn, Netherlands |
| Parent |
Philips (1962–1998) Seagram (1998–2000) |
PolyGram was a Dutch-German entertainment company, a division of Seagram. It started as a major record label recording company founded by Philips and Siemens as a holding company for their music interests in 1972. The name was chosen to reflect the Siemens interest Polydor Records and the Philips interest Phonogram Inc. The company traced its origins through Deutsche Grammophon back to the inventor of the flat disk gramophone, Emil Berliner. Later on, PolyGram expanded into the largest global entertainment company, creating film and television divisions.
In May 1998, it was sold to Seagram which owned MCA Inc. PolyGram Music Group was merged into Universal Music Group, and PolyGram Filmed Entertainment was merged into Universal Pictures. When the new company faced financial difficulties, its parent Seagram was sold in large part to Vivendi, and MCA Inc. became known as Vivendi Universal, as Seagram ceased to exist. Vivendi is the current owner of UMG.
In February 2017, Polygram Entertainment was re-launched as the film & television division of Universal Music Group.
In 1929, Decca Records (London) licensed record shop owner H.W. Van Zoelen as a distributor in the Netherlands. By 1931, his company Hollandsche Decca Distributie (HDD) had become exclusive Decca distributor for all of the Netherlands and its colonies. Over the course of the 1930s, HDD put together its own facilities for A&R, recording, and manufacturing.
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