Philips Records

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Philips Records

Parent company	Universal Music Group
Founded	1950
Distributing label	Decca Music Group
Genre	(historic) Various (current) Classical music
Country of origin	UK
Official website	http://www.decca.com

Philips Records is a record label that was founded by Dutch electronics giant Philips. It was started as Philips Phonographische Industries (PPI) in 1950. During much of the 1950s, it served to distribute recordings made by the US Columbia Records and Columbia Masterworks Records labels in the United Kingdom. In the late 1950s Philips created a subsidiary label, Fontana Records. After Columbia formed its own international operations in 1961 adopting the name of its then parent CBS, Philips acquired Mercury Records. In 1962 Philips Records and Deutsche Grammophon were linked into the Phonogram Records joint venture.

In the eighties Philips Classics Records was formed to distribute its classics artists, although classical recordings have also been issued on the regular Philips label.

In 1983, Philips became the first record label to issue compact discs, using digital recordings that went as far back as 1978. (The first digital recordings, however, were actually remastered versions of vintage recordings by the legendary tenor Enrico Caruso, using the Soundstream process developed in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1975-76. RCA Victor released vinyl versions of these reprocessed, historic recordings. Philips was among the record labels to use the Soundstream process for modern digital recordings.)

Philips Records has been part of Universal Music since 1998. In 1999, Philips Classics was absorbed into the Decca Music Group. Philips Records' pop music catalogue is managed by Mercury Records.

Recently, many of the Philips classical recordings have been reissued on the Eloquence label.