PolyGram Records
 |
|
| Industry |
Music Film Entertainment |
|---|---|
| Fate | Sold to Seagram and merged into Universal Music Group |
| Successor | Universal Music Group & Universal Studios |
| Founded | 1962 as Grammophon-Philips Group (GPG), a joint venture of Philips and Siemens |
| Founder | Philips Records and Deutsche Grammophon |
| Defunct | 1998 |
| Headquarters | Baarn, Netherlands |
| Parent |
Philips (1987–1998) Seagram (1998-1999) |
PolyGram a/k/a The PolyGram Group was a Dutch and German owned mass-media company. It started as a major record label recording company founded by Philips and Siemens as a holding company for their music interests in 1979. 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 a larger entertainment company, creating film and television divisions.
In May 1998, it was sold to Seagram which owned Universal Studios. The newly merged company became Universal Music Group. When the new company faced financial difficulties, its parent Seagram was sold in large part to Vivendi, and for a brief time, the company was known as Vivendi Universal. Vivendi is the current owner of UMG.
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.
HDD was commercially successful during World War II because of the absence of American and British competition. Van Zoelen wanted to sell to Philips so that HDD would have sufficient financial backing when their major competitors returned after the war. This led Philips to purchase HDD in 1942.
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