In 1887, Emile Berliner, invented his ‘Gramophone’ method of recording and reproducing sound using discs, a

process that would revolutionise the way music was heard and experienced. EMI’s history starts at one of the
companies that Berliner formed: The Gramophone Company in London. Established in 1897, it took the lead in
bringing together the new sound recording machines and musicians.

Initially, the medium was largely shunned by established stars, as many saw it as something of a gimmick. The
Gramophone Company however realised that these artists were the key to introducing recorded music to wider
audiences. Through forging relationships with these stars, within a few years its roster of artists included Adelina
Patti, Nellie Melba and, perhaps most significantly, the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso. Over the course of his career, The
Gramophone Company released some 240 Caruso records, and his substantial sales and resultant fame around the
world – not to mention his significant royalty earnings – persuaded many other artists to embrace the new technology.

The Gramophone Company was internationally-minded right from the start. Within a year of being formed,
subsidiaries were established across much of Europe and just a few years later the company was operating across
Europe, Russia and the Middle East as well as in Australia, India, China and parts of Africa. By 1906, less than 10
years after starting up, over 60 per cent of the company’s revenues came from outside the UK.

The Gramophone Company wasn’t the only music company formed in London in 1897. In the same year The
Columbia Phonograph Company, EMI’s other genealogical thread, opened for business. Established by the American
Columbia Phonograph Company General, Columbia traded in cylinder records and the ‘graphophones’ that played
them. For the first few years of the music industry these cylinders outsold Berliner’s flat gramophone records before
the tide began to turn in favour of discs towards the end of the century’s first decade. Columbia too expanded rapidly
oversees, doing business across Europe and in Egypt by 1903.

By 1914 The Gramophone Company was selling nearly four million records a year, but the outbreak of the First World
War that year caused serious disruption to its Columbia’s business as their factories were largely turned over to the
manufacture of munitions. By the end of the war The Gramophone Company had lost its sizeable German business
and was unable to regain control of it (it is still operating today as the classical label Deutsche Grammophon). The
company had also lost all of its operations in Russia due to the war and the Russian Revolution.