Warner Records history

The album 77 Sunset Strip by Don Ralke also provided their first album charter, making #3 and spawning a well-known single of the same name [WB 5025, #69]. Unfortunately, it was the only album which charted for Warner Brothers in 1959.

In 1960, he signed the Everly Brothers away from Archie Bleyer's Cadence label when their contract with cadence expired.

Chart success took a couple years and in the meantime, the label picked up Frank Sinatra’s struggling Reprise Records in 1963 after much-belabored negotiations and a few years later the San Francisco-based Autumn Records, who held early deals with artists like the Grateful Dead and Sly Stone.

Her first hit was "Downtown" [WB 5494], which went straight to #1 in early 1965.

Kinney had started as a funeral parlor chain, but had moved into the entertainment field in 1967 by purchasing D.C. Comics, All- American Comics, and the Ashley Famous Talent Agency.

The move worked as WB-7A in 1969, and only a few years later was purchased by Kinney National Service, a conglomerate.

In 1970, after purchasing Warner and Atlantic, Kinney also bought Elektra Records from Jac Holzman, putting Warner/Reprise, Elektra, and Atlantic all under the Kinney empire.

In 1972, Kinney renamed itself Warner Communications, Inc., which included the giant WEA Distribution corporation (for "Warner/Elektra/Atlantic"). Warner Brothers Records had become part of a gigantic conglomerate, one of the biggest forces in the music industry.

Vinyl sales peaked in 1977 and cassettes were taking off, but the CD’s emergence was what made up for the ground lost in sales from aging baby boomers.

In 1990, Time Inc. and Warner Communications Inc. merged together to create Time Warner.

After the death of Steven Ross in 1992, then the CEO of Time Warner, and after nearly 20 years of leading the industry, Warner was falling behind.

A cultural backlash around rap music, in particular Ice-T’s controversial song “Cop Killer” and Death Row Records, scared the company’s board enough to have them abandon Interscope Records back to its founders Ted Field and Jimmy Iovine in early 1995.

American music unit sales plateaued around the mid-90s, so industry revenue kept going up until 2000 on boosted CD prices while shunning away cheaper priced products (like cassettes or CD singles). Warner sat on the sidelines putting out the music that led much of the record industry’s 90s boom.

During the height of the internet bubble in 2001, AOL bought Time Warner and created an even more unstable beast than Time Warner.

Nearly a decade after Len Blavatnik invested $25 million into Warner back in 2003 during its private equity phase was now the new owner of the record label for $3.3 billion.

The 2011 purchase was done through Access Industry, Blavatnik’s massive global conglomerate that invested in oil, chemicals, technology, and in this case entertainment.

Pentagram worked closely with the company’s leadership, including United States Co-Chairman and CEO Aaron Bay-Schuck and United States Co-Chairman and COO Tom Corson, who joined the company in 2018.

Despite a global pandemic in 2020, Warner Music Group went public with a valuation of $15 billion on the strength of revenues generated not from record sales but from streaming.