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| Stateside Records | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Parent company | Warner Music Group |
| Founded | 1962 (1962) |
| Founder | Fred Oxon |
| Distributors | Warner Records (US) Parlophone (UK) WEA International (Worldwide) Rhino Entertainment (Reissues) |
| Genre | Various |
| Country of origin | UK |
| Official website | www |
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Stateside Records, styled as$tateside Records, is a Britishrecord label, owned byWarner Music Group and operates through itsParlophone andWarner Records imprints. Upon creation, it initially released licensed American recordings and is now a reissue label.
It was formed in1962 byEMI as a replacement for theTop Rank label (originally theRank Organisation's label), which had folded. EMI hired former Top Rank label head Fred Oxon to run it and compete withDecca'sLondon "American Recordings", andPye's "Pye International" labels.
While Top Rank's British acts (such asJohn Leyton) were assigned to EMI'sColumbia andHis Master's Voice labels, Stateside continued to issue records from its American suppliers, includingAmy,Bell,20th Century Fox,Scepter,Vee-Jay andA&M, and acquired Tamla-Motown-Gordy fromOriole Records.
Its first hit was "Palisades Park" byFreddy Cannon, which was licensed fromSwan Records. It was through EMI's relationship with Vee-Jay and Swan that pre-1964 recordings bythe Beatles were released by those labels in the U.S. when EMI's American subsidiaryCapitol turned them down.
Stateside's black label design, with a large '45' for singles and a coloured logo for albums, was the model for the new-look Columbia,Parlophone and His Master's Voice labels which were introduced the following year. In the late 1960s, when EMI set up long term licence contracts with US labels like Motown, Bell andDot, it no longer needed Stateside, and the label was retired quietly in 1973, along with EMI's Columbia, His Master's Voice, Regal Zonophone and Parlophone labels, in favour of the new EMI andEMI America labels. Stateside has retrospectively attracted interest fromnorthern soul fans, mainly for its role in releasing American Motown recordings in the UK market. Stateside issued 45 of them, including the number 1 "Baby Love" in 1964, prior to the establishment of the UK Tamla Motown label.
In the 1980s, the Stateside label was revived as a catalogue reissue label, specialising in American recordings from Capitol Records and other labels EMI acquired over the years. The trademark is now owned by Parlophone Records Limited, as a consequence of the EU-mandated divestiture of some EMI Records assets toWarner Music Group. That forced the deletion of titles to which Capitol Records, now owned byUniversal Music Group, had the rights. In the summer of 2017, Warner Music relaunched the Stateside label for classic jazz, soul and R&B releases.[1]
