Founded in 1924 as 合資會社内外蓄音器商會 (The Naigai Gramophone Co.) in Nishinomiya. The city in Japan was also founded in 1924.
In 1930, the company was renamed as 太平蓄音器株式会社 (Taihei Gramophone Co. Ltd.).
In 1935, the company merged with 日東蓄音器株式會社 and Nippon Crystalate Company to establish Dainippon Gramophone Co., Ltd.
Tokyo Records (written in Japanese as “東京れこをど”) is a Japanese label founded in the 1910s.
The label is known for its logo, which features Mt. Fuji.
Nitto Records (ニットーレコード, Nittō rekōdo) was a Japanese record label, originally published by the company Nittō Chikuonki Kabushiki Gaisha (日東蓄音器株式会社) established in Osaka on March 20, 1920. The label was also called the “Swallow Brand”, because of their trademark artwork.
Nitto was known as a prolific brand, with over 2,000 titles published in about five years. In 1925, they were recognized as one of the two major labels in Japan at that time.
The label produced numerous records of traditional Japanese music and art such as Jōruri, as well as solo plays of western music and orchestra recordings, although the latter remained small in the share of their overall production. As more record companies with foreign capital entered the market, Nitto gradually lost its competitiveness, and was taken over by Taihei Gramophone Co., Ltd. (太平蓄音器株式会社, Taihei Chikuonki Kabushiki Gaisha) in 1935. After the takeover, Taihei renamed the newly merged company Dainippon Gramophone Co., Ltd. (大日本蓄音器株式会社, Dainippon Chikuonki Kabushiki Gaisha), while maintaining the “Swallow Brand – Nitto Records” along with other labels.
The Swallow Nitto brand finally disappeared in 1942, when Dainippon Gramophone was absorbed by Kodansha, shareholder of King Records, to become only a production facility of the latter.
The production of Kayaphon (in Arabic: Kāyā fūn) had no proven commercial purpose: it only existed for the purpose of publishing the recordings of the Club of Aden (al-Nadwa al- ʿAdaniyya), a free association of artists and writers chaired by Ḫalīl Muḥammad Ḫalīl (a singer), Muḥammad ʿAbdu Ġānim (a poet and scholar) and Sālim Bā Madhaf (scholar and historian).
Founded in 1948, this club, which continued its activities for ten years, had chosen to produce music on a voluntary basis and to distribute it free of charge, in particular on the radio from 1954.
This association was supported by a cultural and political, patriotic awakening of the intellectual and artistic elites of Aden, which explains this militant spirit. The record numbers follow the abbreviation RKA, probably for Record Kayaphon Aden. The labels are royal blue. Still according to the militant spirit of the Club, its founders refused to include the musician’s name on every record.
Tahaphon was founded by Ṭaha Muḥammad Ḥamūd, the brother of Ǧaʿfar Muḥammad Ḥamūd, after the JAFFERPHON company ceased in 1953.
Ṭaha Muḥammad Ḥamūd also owned several cinemas (like his father and grandfather) and had founded several local radio stations that existed before Radio Aden. The covers and labels of this company, especially their graphics, indicate a later period than the previous ones, certainly after the war: for the first time, a Yemeni company has a figurative logo, a roaring lion, and it was a photo.
The numbers listed in the CPMY catalog range from 0 to 270 (one number for each side), resulting in a production of around 135 records.
The label ceased approx. in 1956.
JAFFERPHON was a record label from Yemen starting in the 1930s until 1953.
The Jafferphon company which was created in the name of a Sayyid Ǧaʿfar and sons, is the result of the industrial and commercial adventure of a remarkable family who had played a great role in the introduction of modern forms of entertainment to Aden: the grandfather, the sayyid Ḥamūd Ḥasan al ‑ Hāšimī, who came from Muḫa and settled in Aden in the ʿAydarūs district, introduced silent cinema there in 1911. In 1925, he and his son Muḥammad had marketed the first gramophones in Aden and the first imported Arab and foreign records, that is to say the very year of the arrival of electricity.
Through his son Muḥammad, Ḥamūd had, among many others, two grandsons, one named Ǧaʿfar, and the other Ṭaha. The first family-controlled record company therefore took the name Ǧaʿfar, one of the elders, as Ǧaʿfar fūn (English: JAFFERPHON).
The imprint of the founder, the grandfather, nicknamed “Master Ḥamūd” persisted for a very long time, as shown by the numerous vocal announcements at the beginning of the recording, mentioning him in this somewhat enigmatic form: “Master Ḥamūd”.
Unlike Aden Crown, JAFFERPHON managed to continue his activities beyond the war, despite the transport difficulties caused by the war, and even after the war. In the series of numbers there is clearly a gap between 526 and 1024. This break in the digital series therefore seems to mark a stop between two temporal periods of production: one clearly linked , it seems, before the war and the other rather after the war (resumption of the publication of records in 1950 pubishing about 200 records (Nr. 1024 – 1236)). This cut would therefore have been caused by World War II, which is very plausible.
ADEN CROWN was a local company created by Ali al ‑ Ṣāfī and his brothers, between around 1937 and 1938. It was the first purely Yemeni company.
The overall production of this company was quite large: around 1,220 records. But obviously she did not continue the activities during the war. As the masters had to be sent to England by boat, and the pressed disks had to be sent back to Aden as well, this was made very difficult by the dangers of navigation from 1940. It can therefore be assumed that ADEN CROWN ceased her activities at this time.
There have been two types of labels. But these two series do not seem to be distinguished by a different chronology (although the second is rather located in the last issues), they rather seem to be parallel or partly overlap, at least one number has both a blue and a black version (# 1008).:
Like Odeon, ADEN CROWN therefore devoted himself mainly to solo vocals accompanied by the lute, sometimes also accompanied by a violin; there is little percussion (the recording technique is not yet suitable), and very little rural music.
Following the two important pioneer companies that were Odeon and Aden Crown, but also Parlophon whose activity was more limited, several local companies will follow, in particular Jafferphon and Tahaphon. Their names are evidently based on the model of the Parlophon company or on that of the Lebanese company Baidaphon (founded in 1905).
АРТИСТОТИПИЯ (Artistotipia) was a “prestigious” phonograph records label originally manufactured by the Berlin gramophone society “International Extra Record”, and later by Kiev factory “Extraphone”. The first records appeared in 1909. It was an extremely interesting label that included popular performers from gypsy and romance singers up to opera prima donnas and outstanding Ukrainian singers of that era.
«Beka Records» was a record label based in Germany, active from about 1903 to 1925. Before the Great War Beka also made gramophone records for the United Kingdom and Russian markets under the «Beka-Grand-Record» label. Russian repertoir of the company was vast; according to A.Zhelezny the first records were made as early as 1905 (1906 according to P.Grunberg).
Beka often sold their Russian matrixes to another gramophone companies.
After the Great War broke out in 1914 Бека-Грандъ-Пластинка stopped all operations in Russia. Eventually, the company became a subsidiary of the «Carl Lindström A.G.» group which was sold to the Columbia Graphophone Company in 1926.
