RCA Camden was a budget record label introduced by RCA Victor in the 1950s.
The label was named after Camden, New Jersey, original home to the Victor Talking Machine Company, later RCA Victor. It specialized in reissuing historic classical and popular recordings from the extensive RCA Victor catalog. The long play albums originally sold for $1.98 retail and consisted of strictly monaural recordings, often drawn from 78-rpm masters. The label also issued 45-rpm "extended play" (EP) records, including contemporary singers such as Snooky Lanson and Jack Haskell, at a suggested retail price of 79 cents.
RCA Victor originally reissued its older classical symphonic recordings on the Camden label using the real names of the orchestras involved. But soon, to avoid competing with modern recordings by the same orchestras, they adopted a series of pseudonyms. Here is a partial listing of the real orchestras and their pseudonyms:
The RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra was a New York City "pick-up" orchestra drawn from members of the NBC Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The New York City Symphony Orchestra, created by Leopold Stokowski in the 1940s, recorded for RCA Victor and some of its recordings were issued on Camden under the name "Sutton Symphony Orchestra," not to be confused with a British orchestra with the same name.
In the mid 1950s, RCA Camden began dabbling in rhythm & blues and, later, rock and roll releases, issuing, for example, an EP of such songs by "The Honey Dreamers". About 1958, Camden began releasing stereo albums and subsequently issued popular recordings by the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, The Living Strings and Living Voices.