Catalog Numbering Systems For Single Records - EMI

EMI

In the 1950s and early 1960s, EMI issued singles in the United Kingdom under the Columbia, HMV and Parlophone labels.

• Columbia singles generally had two letter prefixes such as DB, followed by 3- or 4-digit numbers. In the most common series, the DB series, numbers reached 4000 in 1957 and approached 5000 in 1963. At about that time, a jump in the sequence occurred to 7000-series numbers.
• HMV issued 78rpm singles with the prefix B and a 5-digit number in the early 1950s. HMV 45rpm singles in the popular genre generally had numbers with the prefix 7M and 3 digits until 1956, changing in that year to POP prefixes, starting at 239. The B 5-digit numbers and the 7M 3-digit numbers were unrelated.

For its European branches, EMI changed at the end of the sixties to a uniform numbering system using the pattern xx xxx–xxxxx.

• The first two digits represent the country (e.g. 1C is Germany, 2C is France, 3C is Italy, etc.).
• The second three digits are mostly 006, but sometimes 004 or 008 was used for repressings, while 000 is used for jukebox pressing.
• The last five digits are the unique single reference for the single.

In the 1980s, this system was abandoned. The current European system consists of 7 digits, mostly beginning with 86 and ending with 2 to indicate it is a CD single, e.g. 868384 2. (For the international EAN code, the standard 74321 number precedes the 7 digits and the 0 is added after the code).