Sony owns the Columbia record label almost everywhere except Japan
Sony Music puts out records under the Columbia name around the world, with one exception: its home country. In Japan the Columbia trademark belongs to an unrelated firm, Nippon Columbia, so Sony's Japanese arm uses Sony Records instead. That quirk is one of many left over from a century of mergers and renamings.
The company began in 1929 as the American Record Corporation, formed by merging several labels, and in 1934 it bought the Columbia Phonograph Company. The broadcaster CBS acquired it in 1938 under William S. Paley. Its Columbia label pioneered the LP record under Edward Wallerstein and launched Epic in 1953. Because the Columbia name was only its own in North America, the overseas business traded as CBS Records, and by 1966 the whole operation carried that name.
Sony's ties started with a Japanese joint venture in March 1968. Since Sony co-developed the compact disc, a plant built under that partnership let CBS supply some of the first CDs sold in America in 1983. On November 17, 1987 Sony bought CBS Records outright for US$2 billion, but CBS kept its name and granted only a temporary licence. So on January 1, 1991 the company became Sony Music Entertainment, and Sony revived Columbia as a worldwide label after buying the international rights from EMI.
Later deals were just as tangled. In 1995 Sony and Michael Jackson merged their publishing catalogues into Sony/ATV. In 2004 Sony and Bertelsmann formed an equal partnership, Sony BMG, which Sony bought out entirely in 2008; a 2010 contract with Jackson's estate worth more than $250 million was the largest in recorded-music history. The recording and publishing arms were combined as Sony Music Group in 2019.
One reversal says a lot about taste. Sony stopped pressing vinyl in 1989, then announced in 2017 that it would press records in-house again, though the BBC reported it was struggling to find older engineers who remembered how. Today it ranks second of the three major labels, valued at $25 billion, and its publishing arm is the largest in the world.
Source: Sony Music
