Zonophone
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Zonophone, early on also rendered as Zon-O-Phone was a record label founded in 1899 in Camden, New Jersey by Frank Seaman. The Zonophone name was not that of the company, but was applied to the records and machines sold by Seaman from 1899-1900 to 1903.
Seaman had worked for Emile Berliner's Berliner Gramophone. Seaman decided to start his own company to produce disc records and disc phonographs. Seaman's "Zon-O-Phone" records design and technology were shamelessly stolen from Berliner, and the machines similarly copied from the products of Eldridge R. Johnson's Consolidated Talking Machine Company. Astoundingly, Seaman then sued Berliner and Johnson for violating his technology! With the help of lawyer Phillip Mauro, Seaman arranged for an alliance with Columbia Records (then manufacturing only cylinder records and machines), arguing that the patents held by Columbia concerning cylinders applied to any type of recording where a stylus vibrated in a groove, and that Zon-O-Phone would pay royalties if Columbia helped him drive Berliner out of business. In 1900 Seaman and Mauro succeeded in getting a judge to file an injunction that Berliner and Johnson stop making their products.
Johnson and Berliner counter-sued, and the following year emerged victorious in court—prompting the name of their new combined company, The Victor.
Further legal actions dragged on until 1903, when all of the United States and Latin American assets of Zon-O-Phone were turned over to Victor, and the Europe and British Commonwealth assets to the Gramophone & Typewriter Company (which would later become the Gramophone Company and launch the His Master's Voice record label).
Victor Talking Machine continued use of the "Zonophone" name to market cheaper records which for whatever reason were not of the technical standard of the Victor label until retiring the label in the U.S. in 1910.
In the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, the Gramophone Company continued to use the "Zonophone" label through 1931. When the company merged with the Columbia Graphophone Company to form Electrical and Musical Industries, Ltd. (EMI), the lower-priced labels of the two firms were merged also as Regal Zonophone. Post WWII, Regal Zonophone was largely dormant in Britain until 1964, when the label was revived with a few beat group offerings but became primarily known for hosting the Salvation Army-affiliated band The Joystrings , who had a brace of chart placings and released several 45s, EPs and LPs through the end of the 1960s. The Joystrings appearance on the label hearkened back to the 1930s and 1940s when Regal Zonophone regularly released Salvation Army brass band recordings. Regal Zonophone was also widely used as a catchall EMI label in foreign territories, and often in regions or nations where the main EMI Columbia and HMV logos and trademarks were disputed/held by competitors.
In 1967 Regal Zonophone was revived yet again as an EMI label featuring acts signed to music publisher David Platz's independent production group Straight Ahead, several of which had seen chart action on Decca's Deram label. Chief among these were Procul Harum (with their label the inspiration for their Magdalene (My Regal Zonophone)), and The Move, joined by Marc Bolan's Tyrannosaurus Rex and Joe Cocker. This new impetus was largely dissipated by 1970, when many of the Straight Ahead acts moved to the Fly and Cube labels, although new releases as well as reissues were issued on the Regal Zonophone label through the late 1970s.
In the early 1980s, Zonophone was revived by EMI to ride the post punk train with artists such as Angelic Upstarts, The Cockney Rejects and compilations such as the Oi! album. In fact, many of the releases on the label at the time did reflect the Oi! arm of post punk rather than anything else.
By the mid-1980s the Zonophone imprint had disappeared again. It wasn't until the mid to late 1990s that it reappeared in a very different guise, as a home for back catalogue artists of cult credibility and the odd one off single. Zonophone has now become the home to The Cramps' Illegal recordings in the UK alongside David Axelrod produced albums by David McCallum, the cult sitar classic Lord Sitar, Cilla Black and classic compilations of Capitol era material from the likes of Glen Campbell and Bobbie Gentry.
In 2007 the Zonophone label is to be re-launched again with the release of cult, hard to find, or unreleased material from the whole spectrum of E.M.I.'s vast back catalogue either as physical CDs, digital downloads only or both.
