History
Matador was started by Chris Lombardi in 1989 in his New York City apartment. The following year, Lombardi was joined by former Homestead Records manager Gerard Cosloy, and the two of them have run it together since. In 1993, the label began a partnership with Atlantic Records which lasted for a couple of years. Then in 1996, Capitol Records purchased a 49 percent stake in Matador, but Lombardi and Cosloy bought it back in 1999. It has been co-owned by the Beggars Group since 2002 and now operates in both New York and London.
Patrick Amory, Matador's longtime label manager, is currently label President and a partner of Lombardi and Cosloy.
In the early 2000s, Matador had to sidestep unwanted involvement in the current Recording Industry Association of America dispute over Peer-to-peer file sharing networks. Matador's Patrick Amory contacted the RIAA multiple times in order to ensure that an erroneous listing on the group's website of Matador as an RIAA member was removed. After several attempts, the name of the independent label was removed from the membership list.
Matador acquired True Panther Sounds as an imprint in 2009.
In October 2010, Matador celebrated the label's 21st anniversary with a series of concerts at the Palms Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. Pavement, Yo La Tengo, the New Pornographers, Ted Leo & The Pharmacists, Guided By Voices, Kurt Vile, Cold Cave, Fucked Up, Liz Phair, Shearwater, Superchunk, Come, Times New Viking, Belle & Sebastian, Cat Power, Chavez, Perfume Genius, Harlem, and Guitar Wolf were amongst the participants.
Read more about this topic: Matador Records
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“It would be naive to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically resolve the problems.... However, with faith and perseverance,... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace. They can be resolved in the future, provided, of course, that we can think of five new ways to measure the height of a tall building by using a barometer.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.
In Beverly Hills ... they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.”
—Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)