Major Labels Enter The Budget Album Market
In 1954 Pickwick entered into a licensing arrangement with Capitol Records giving Pickwick the rights to press and distribute Capitol's secondary and noncurrent titles on their label. Pickwick's records were mostly sold in stores other than record shops such as department stores, dimestores, drugstores, and supermarkets. Pickwick later had several subsidiaries such as Bravo, Design, International Award, Hurrah, Grand Prix, and Hallmark Records in the U.K.
RCA Records introduced RCA Camden Records in 1955, a budget label for re-releasing older recordings by currently popular artists on the label or vintage material from previous decades. Occasionally, original music was produced for release on RCA Camden such as children's music and instrumentals. RCA Camden also released a single album of country music recorded especially for the budget label by many of its newer country acts of the 1960s such as Connie Smith, Liz Anderson, and Dottie West to perhaps encourage sales of the artists' full-priced product. RCA Camden was particularly successful in repackaging older Elvis Presley recordings on the Camden label, as well as material he recorded for his motion pictures, making these albums among the select few budget albums to actually make the national best-selling charts.
The major labels' budget album releases were seldom sold at "drug stores", mainly at record shops and department stores just like the full-price product although RCA Camden did on occasion market their albums in speciality "drug store" racks. The major label budget albums usually had eight to ten songs on them (usually nine) as opposed to full-price releases which contained ten to twelve songs.
Columbia Records introduced the Harmony Records line around the same time for budget releases of older product repackaged. Harmony, however, seldom issued material that had not been previously released.
The budget albums great heyday was in the late 1960s and early 1970s when nearly every recording artist of note had one or more such collections on the market. Often these were recordings done for a previous record label before the star's current popularity.
Other major labels of the day with their own budget lines include:
- Cameo-Parkway created Wyncote Records
- MGM Records released Metro Records and Lion Records
- Liberty Records' budget label was Sunset Records
- Columbia Records' budget label was Harmony Records
- United Artists Records produced Unart Records
- Starday Records (arguably a budget label itself) created Nashville Records
- Atlantic Records had a short-lived budget label, Clarion Records
- Modern Records created Crown Records
- EMI created MFP
Other budget record labels were Somerset Records that became Alshire Records in 1963, Stereo Fidelity, Audi Spectrum, Peter Rabbit (children's records) and Azteca, Music for Pleasure a subsidiary of EMI, Score Records a subsidiary of Aladdin Records, Custom, and Diplomat Records a product of the Synthetic Plastics Company who made Peter Pan Records and Ambassador Records.
In England the Woolworths Group jointly owned Embassy Records with Oriole Records, later part of CBS.
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