1.
Album
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Album, is a collection of audio recordings issued as a single item on CD, record, audio tape, or another medium. Albums of recorded music were developed in the early 20th century, first as books of individual 78rpm records, vinyl LPs are still issued, though in the 21st century album sales have mostly focused on compact disc and MP3 formats. The audio cassette was a format used from the late 1970s through to the 1990s alongside vinyl, an album may be recorded in a recording studio, in a concert venue, at home, in the field, or a mix of places. Recording may take a few hours to years to complete, usually in several takes with different parts recorded separately. Recordings that are done in one take without overdubbing are termed live, the majority of studio recordings contain an abundance of editing, sound effects, voice adjustments, etc. With modern recording technology, musicians can be recorded in separate rooms or at times while listening to the other parts using headphones. Album covers and liner notes are used, and sometimes additional information is provided, such as analysis of the recording, historically, the term album was applied to a collection of various items housed in a book format. In musical usage the word was used for collections of pieces of printed music from the early nineteenth century. Later, collections of related 78rpm records were bundled in book-like albums, the LP record, or 33 1⁄3 rpm microgroove vinyl record, is a gramophone record format introduced by Columbia Records in 1948. It was adopted by the industry as a standard format for the album. Apart from relatively minor refinements and the important later addition of stereophonic sound capability, the term album had been carried forward from the early nineteenth century when it had been used for collections of short pieces of music. Later, collections of related 78rpm records were bundled in book-like albums, as part of a trend of shifting sales in the music industry, some commenters have declared that the early 21st century experienced the death of the album. Sometimes shorter albums are referred to as mini-albums or EPs, Albums such as Tubular Bells, Amarok, Hergest Ridge by Mike Oldfield, and Yess Close to the Edge, include fewer than four tracks. There are no rules against artists such as Pinhead Gunpowder referring to their own releases under thirty minutes as albums. These are known as box sets, material is stored on an album in sections termed tracks, normally 11 or 12 tracks. A music track is a song or instrumental recording. The term is associated with popular music where separate tracks are known as album tracks. When vinyl records were the medium for audio recordings a track could be identified visually from the grooves
2.
INXS
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INXS were an Australian rock band, formed as The Farriss Brothers in 1977 in Sydney, New South Wales. They began playing covers in Western Australian pubs and clubs, occasionally playing some of their original music, mainstays were main composer and keyboardist Andrew Farriss, drummer Jon Farriss, guitarists Tim Farriss and Kirk Pengilly, bassist Garry Gary Beers and main lyricist and vocalist Michael Hutchence. For twenty years, INXS was fronted by Hutchence, whose good looks. Initially known for their new style, the band later developed a harder pub rock style that included funk. In 1980, INXS first charted in their native Australia with their debut self-titled album, but later garnered moderate success in countries with Shabooh Shoobah. Though The Swing brought more success from around the world, its single Original Sin was even greater commercially, in the 1990s, INXS achieved a greater fan following through Hutchences romance with fellow Australian singer Kylie Minogue, and achieved greater acclaim in the United Kingdom. However, starting with Welcome to Wherever You Are, in 1992, after Hutchence was found dead in his hotel suite in Sydney in November 1997, the band did not perform publicly for a year. They made appearances with several guest singers, including Jimmy Barnes, Terence Trent DArby and Jon Stevens, Stevens formally joined the band for a tour and recording session in 2002. In 2005, members of INXS participated in Rock Star, INXS, with Fortune, the band released Pretty Vegas and Afterglow as singles, and the album Switch. In late 2010, the recorded and released Original Sin. INXS won six Australian Recording Industry Association awards including three for Best Group in 1987,1989 and 1992, and was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2001, as of June 2015, INXS has sold over 50 million records worldwide. The origins of the band began with Andrew Farriss convincing his fellow Davidson High School classmate, Michael Hutchence, to join his band, Doctor Dolphin. The band contained two other classmates, Kent Kerny and Neil Sanders and a player, Garry Beers and Geoff Kennely, from a nearby high school. In 1977, Tim Farriss, Andrews older brother, invited Andrew, Hutchence and Beers to join him, Tim and Pengilly had been playing together since 1971 as either an acoustic duo, Kirk and Tim, or as a four-piece band called Guinness. The band made their debut on 16 August 1977 at Whale Beach,40 km north of Sydney. Andrew Farriss remembers, I thought the show went really well, but I think my dad summed it up the day, Great show. I think everyone might have been stoned and they briefly performed as The Vegetables, singing We Are the Vegetables, before returning to Sydney ten months later, where they recorded a set of demos. At a chance meeting in the car park of the Narrabeen Antler, a pub in Narrabeen on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, New South Wales, Tim was approached by Gary Morris, the manager of Midnight Oil
3.
Rock music
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It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by blues, rhythm and blues and country music. Rock music also drew strongly on a number of genres such as electric blues and folk. Musically, rock has centered on the guitar, usually as part of a rock group with electric bass guitar. Typically, rock is song-based music usually with a 4/4 time signature using a verse-chorus form, like pop music, lyrics often stress romantic love but also address a wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political in emphasis. Punk was an influence into the 1980s on the subsequent development of subgenres, including new wave, post-punk. From the 1990s alternative rock began to rock music and break through into the mainstream in the form of grunge, Britpop. Similarly, 1970s punk culture spawned the visually distinctive goth and emo subcultures and this trio of instruments has often been complemented by the inclusion of other instruments, particularly keyboards such as the piano, Hammond organ and synthesizers. The basic rock instrumentation was adapted from the blues band instrumentation. A group of musicians performing rock music is termed a rock band or rock group, Rock music is traditionally built on a foundation of simple unsyncopated rhythms in a 4/4 meter, with a repetitive snare drum back beat on beats two and four. Melodies are often derived from older musical modes, including the Dorian and Mixolydian, harmonies range from the common triad to parallel fourths and fifths and dissonant harmonic progressions. Critics have stressed the eclecticism and stylistic diversity of rock, because of its complex history and tendency to borrow from other musical and cultural forms, it has been argued that it is impossible to bind rock music to a rigidly delineated musical definition. These themes were inherited from a variety of sources, including the Tin Pan Alley pop tradition, folk music and rhythm, as a result, it has been seen as articulating the concerns of this group in both style and lyrics. Christgau, writing in 1972, said in spite of some exceptions, rock and roll usually implies an identification of male sexuality, according to Simon Frith rock was something more than pop, something more than rock and roll. Rock musicians combined an emphasis on skill and technique with the concept of art as artistic expression, original. The foundations of music are in rock and roll, which originated in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Its immediate origins lay in a melding of various musical genres of the time, including rhythm and blues and gospel music, with country. In 1951, Cleveland, Ohio disc jockey Alan Freed began playing rhythm and blues music for a multi-racial audience, debate surrounds which record should be considered the first rock and roll record. Other artists with rock and roll hits included Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis
4.
Atlantic Records
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Atlantic Recording Corporation is an American major record label founded in October 1947 by Ahmet Ertegün and Herb Abramson. In 2004, Atlantic Records and its sister label Elektra Records merged into Atlantic Records Group, craig Kallman is currently the chairman of Atlantic Records. Ahmet Ertegün served as founding chairman until his death on December 14,2006, the brothers had become ardent fans of jazz and rhythm & blues music, amassing a collection of over 15,00078 RPM records. He convinced the family dentist, Dr Vahdi Sabit, to invest $10,000 and recruited Herb Abramson, Abramson had worked as a part-time A&R manager/producer for the jazz label National Records, signing Big Joe Turner and Billy Eckstine. He founded Jubilee Records in 1946, but had no interest in its most successful artists, so, in September 1947, he sold his share in Jubilee to his partner, Jerry Blaine, and invested $2500 in the new Atlantic label. When interviewed in 2009 she attributed her reputation to the companys chronic cash-flow shortage, most of the problems we had with artists were that they wanted advances, and that was very difficult for us. We were undercapitalized for a long time, the labels original office in the Ritz Hotel, Manhattan proved too expensive so they relocated to an $85 per month room in the Hotel Jefferson. In its early years Atlantic focused principally on modern jazz although it released some country and western and spoken word recordings. The union action forced Atlantic to use almost all its capital to cut and stockpile enough recordings to last through the ban, Ertegun and Abramson spent much of the late 1940s and early 1950s scouring nightclubs in search of talent. Ertegun composed many songs under the alias A, in early 1949 a New Orleans distributor phoned Ertegun trying to obtain Stick McGhees Drinking Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee, which was unavailable due to the closure of McGhees previous label. Ertegun knew Sticks younger brother Brownie McGhee, with whom Stick happened to be staying, so he contacted the McGhee brothers, Ertegun asked about artists royalties, which he paid, which surprised Columbia executives, who did not, which scuttled the deal. On the recommendation of broadcaster Willis Conover, Ertegun and Abramson went to see Ruth Brown at the Crystal Caverns club in Washington and she was badly injured in a car accident en route to New York but Atlantic supported her for nine months and then signed her. Her first release for the label So Long, cut at her second Atlantic session on May 25,1949 with the Eddie Condon band, was a major hit, reaching #6 on the R&B chart. Brown went on to more than eighty songs for the label, becoming the most prolific. So significant was Browns success to Atlantics fortunes that the label became known colloquially as The House That Ruth Built. The Clovers Dont You Know I Love You became the labels first R&B #1 in September 1951 and she hit #1 again in March–April 1952 with 5-10-15 Hours. After she left the label in 1961 Browns fortunes declined rapidly - within a few years was reduced to working as a cleaner and bus-driver to support her children. Brown eventually received a payment of $20,000 and founded a charity
5.
Mercury Records
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Mercury Records is an American-based record label owned by Universal Music Group. In the United States, it operates through Island Records, in the UK, Mercury Record Corporation was formed in the American city of Chicago in 1945 by Irving Green, Berle Adams, Ray Greenberg and Arthur Talmadge. They were a force in jazz and blues, classical music, rock and roll. Early in the history, Mercury opened two pressing plants, one in Chicago and the other in St. Louis, Missouri. With the use of presses and providing 24-hour turnaround, they went into direct competition with major recording labels such as Columbia, Decca, Capitol. By hiring two promoters, Tiny Hill and Jimmy Hilliard, they penetrated the pop market with such as Frankie Laine, Vic Damone, Tony Fontane. Rather than rely on radio airplay, Mercury initially relied on jukeboxes to promote their music, some early Mercury recordings featured a caricature of him as its logo. In 1947 Jack Rael, a musician and publicist/manager, persuaded Mercury to let Patti Page record a song that had planned to be done by Vic Damone. The budget was too small for them to hire a second singer to provide the parts to Page. The company released a number of recordings under the Mercury label as well as its subsidiaries. In addition, they leased and purchased material by independent labels, under their own label, Mercury released a variety of recording styles from classical music to psychedelic rock. However, its subsidiaries focused on their own specialized categories of music, Mercurys jazz division had two distinct and important fathers. John Hammond brought his expertise and connections when Mercury bought Keynote Records in the late 1940s, and Mercury was the issuing company and distributor for Norman Granzs pre-Norgran/Verve recordings. Although both Hammond and Granz had departed Mercury by the mid-1950s, they established the company in the jazz world, by the early 1960s, Mercury was releasing jazz under the flagship label and was an early leader in the new stereo sound releases. Highlights of the early and mid-1960s included albums by Quincy Jones, Buddy Rich, Cannonball Adderley, Charles Mingus, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Max Roach, in the early 1950s, Norman Granz started his own record company, Norgran, which later became Verve. In an ironic twist, both Mercury and Verve are now owned by Universal Music Group and Mercurys jazz library falls under the Verve division. Since the early 1990s, Verve has reissued many Mercury jazz titles on CD, often taking care to use original master tapes, in 1962, Mercury began marketing a line of phonographs made by Philips bearing the Mercury brand name. In July 1967, Mercury Records became the first U. S. record company to release cassette music tapes, in 1969, Mercury changed its corporate name to Mercury Record Productions Inc. while its parent Conelco became North American Philips Corp after Philips brought control of the company
6.
Warner Music Group
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Warner Music Group is an American multinational entertainment and record label conglomerate headquartered in New York City. With a multibillion-dollar annual turnover, WMG employs in excess of 3,500 people and has operations in more than 50 countries throughout the world, the company owns and operates some of the largest and most successful record labels in the world, including its flagship labels Warner Bros. WMG also owns Warner/Chappell Music, one of the worlds largest music publishers, the film company had no record label division at the time and one of its contracted actors, Tab Hunter, scored a hit song for Dot Records, which was a division of rival Paramount Pictures. In order to prevent any repetition of its actors recording for rival companies, in 1963, Warner purchased Reprise Records, which had been founded by Frank Sinatra three years earlier so that he could have more creative control over his recordings. With the Reprise acquisition, Warner gained the services of Mo Ostin, the Canadian unit was opened in 1967 as Warner Reprise Canada Ltd, now called Warner Music Canada Co. After Warner Bros. was sold to Seven Arts Productions in 1967, it purchased Atlantic Records, founded in 1947 and WMGs oldest label and this acquisition brought Neil Young into the company fold, initially as a member of Buffalo Springfield. The Geffen catalogue, now owned by Universal Music Group, represents Youngs only major recordings not under WMG ownership, in 1969, two years after being purchased by Seven Arts, the Warner Bros. -Seven Arts company was sold to the Kinney National Company. Kinney combined the operations of all of its labels. An earlier attempt by Warner Bros. Records to create a distribution arm in 1958 didnt materialize. So in 1969, Elektra Records boss Jac Holzman approached Atlantics Jerry Wexler with the idea of setting up a joint distribution network for Warner, Elektra, an experimental branch was established in Southern California as a possible prototype for an expanded operation. Atlantic, its subsidiary Atco Records, and its affiliate Stax Records paved the way for Warners rise to industry prominence, the purchase brought in Atlantics lucrative back-catalogue, which included classic recordings by Ray Charles, the Drifters, the Coasters, and many more. But the sale led to Stax leaving the Atlantic fold because the new Warner owners insisted on keeping the rights to Stax recordings and it was soon apparent in 1969 that Atlantic/Atco president Ahmet Ertegün viewed Warner/Reprise president Mike Maitland as godlike. Maitland believed that, as vice-president in charge of the Warner Bros, in retrospect Ertegün clearly feared that Maitland would ultimately have more power than him and so he moved rapidly to secure his own position and remove Maitland. Following the takeover, Warners music group briefly adopted the umbrella name Kinney Music, erteguns campaign against Maitland began in earnest that summer. Atlantic had agreed to help Warner Bros. in its efforts to establish its labels overseas, Mike Maitland complained bitterly to Kinney executive Ted Ashley, but to no avail – by this time Ertegun was poised to make his move against Maitland. As he had with Hyman, Ertegun urged Steve Ross to extend Mo Ostin and Joe Smiths contracts, in response, Ertegun broadly hinted that Maitlands days were numbered and that he, Ertegun, was about to take over the recording division. Unlike the Warner/Reprise executives, Atlantics execs the Ertegun brothers and Wexler owned stock in Kinney, on Sunday January 25, Ted Ashley went to Maitlands house to tell him he had been dismissed, and Maitland declined the offer of a job at the movie studio. One week later, Mo Ostin was named as the new President of Warner Bros, Records, with Joe Smith as his Executive Vice-President
7.
Record producer
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A record producer or music producer oversees and manages the sound recording and production of a band or performers music, which may range from recording one song to recording a lengthy concept album. A producer has many roles during the recording process, the roles of a producer vary. The producer may perform these roles himself, or help select the engineer, the producer may also pay session musicians and engineers and ensure that the entire project is completed within the record companies budget. A record producer or music producer has a broad role in overseeing and managing the recording. Producers also often take on an entrepreneurial role, with responsibility for the budget, schedules, contracts. In the 2010s, the industry has two kinds of producers with different roles, executive producer and music producer. Executive producers oversee project finances while music producers oversee the process of recording songs or albums. In most cases the producer is also a competent arranger, composer. The producer will also liaise with the engineer who concentrates on the technical aspects of recording. Noted producer Phil Ek described his role as the person who creatively guides or directs the process of making a record, indeed, in Bollywood music, the designation actually is music director. The music producers job is to create, shape, and mold a piece of music, at the beginning of record industry, producer role was technically limited to record, in one shot, artists performing live. The role of producers changed progressively over the 1950s and 1960s due to technological developments, the development of multitrack recording caused a major change in the recording process. Before multitracking, all the elements of a song had to be performed simultaneously, all of these singers and musicians had to be assembled in a large studio and the performance had to be recorded. As well, for a song that used 20 instruments, it was no longer necessary to get all the players in the studio at the same time. Examples include the rock sound effects of the 1960s, e. g. playing back the sound of recorded instruments backwards or clanging the tape to produce unique sound effects. These new instruments were electric or electronic, and thus they used instrument amplifiers, new technologies like multitracking changed the goal of recording, A producer could blend together multiple takes and edit together different sections to create the desired sound. For example, in jazz fusion Bandleader-composer Miles Davis album Bitches Brew, producers like Phil Spector and George Martin were soon creating recordings that were, in practical terms, almost impossible to realise in live performance. Producers became creative figures in the studio, other examples of such engineers includes Joe Meek, Teo Macero, Brian Wilson, and Biddu
