Rhino Records
| Rhino Entertainment | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Parent company | Warner Music Group |
| Founded | 1978 |
| Founder | Harold Bronson Richard Foos |
| Distributor(s) | Rhino Records (in the US) WEA International (outside the US) |
| Genre | Various |
| Country of origin | U.S. |
| Location | Los Angeles, California |
| Official website | www |
Rhino Entertainment Company is an American specialty record label and production company founded in 1978. It is currently the catalog division for the Warner Music Group.
Founded in 1978, Rhino was originally a novelty and reissue label during the 1970s and 1980s. It released compilation albums of pop, rock & roll, and rhythm & blues successes from the 1950s through the 1980s, as well as novelty-song LPs (compiled in-house or by Dr. Demento) and retrospectives of famous comedy performers, including Richard Pryor, Stan Freberg, Tom Lehrer, and Spike Jones.
Rhino started as a record shop on Westwood Boulevard, Los Angeles, in 1973, run by Richard Foos, and became a record distributor five years later thanks to the effort of then-store manager Harold Bronson. Their early releases were mostly novelty records (their first single, in 1975, was Wild Man Fischer's "Go To Rhino Records") and punk rock singles; the difficulties involved in getting airplay and distribution for such material eventually caused Foos and Bronson to take the label in other directions. One of Rhino's early artists was The Twisters, whose Los Angeles popularity far exceeded their album sales. The labels on early Rhino records featured the company's mascot character, a cartoon Elvis Presley rhinoceros wearing a black leather jacket.
Some of the label's earliest successes with reissues were achieved by acquiring the rights to the White Whale Records catalog that included The Turtles. By the mid-1980s, most of Rhino's releases were reissues of previously released recordings licensed from other companies. For superior sound quality, audio mastering of the original tapes (where possible) was done under the direction of Bill Inglot, and the label's creative packaging made Rhino one of the most respected reissue record labels, receiving rave reviews from music collectors, fans, and historians; and later, Grammy nominations and awards. Rhino was quick to get into the compact disc market, releasing dozens of oldies CDs at the dawn of the CD age in 1984. Their retrospective compact disc releases, such as those in the Billboard Top Hits series, are often remastered to restore or improve upon the releases' original analog audio quality.
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