Music Corporation of America

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Image:Music corporation of america.jpg The Music Corporation of America was a United States based corporation in the music business. The successor company is Universal Music Group. MCA published music, booked acts, and ran a record label.

MCA was founded as a music booking agency based in Chicago, Illinois in 1924 by Jules Stein. MCA helped pioneer modern practices of touring bands and name acts. Prominent early MCA booked artists included King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton.

Lew Wasserman rose through the ranks to MCA for more than four decades, with Sonny Werblin as his right-hand man. Other executives within the company were Sidney Sheinberg, President of MCA, and Ned Tanen, head of Universal Pictures. Tanen was behind Universal hits such as Animal House, and John Hughes's Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club.

Wasserman expanded the company's presence into television (founding EMKA, Ltd., which owns Paramount Pictures's pre-1948 film library and Revue Studios, the top supplier of television for all broadcast networks, spanning three decades). He also purchased Universal Studios in 1962, and made it into the top film studio in town, producing hit after hit.

MCA entered the record music business in 1962 with the purchase of the US Decca branch, including Coral Records and Brunswick Records. These labels were folded into MCA Records in 1973. In 1975, the company entered the book publishing business with the acquisition of G. P. Putnam's Sons. Wasserman was forced to dissolve MCA's talent agency in 1962 - which represented most of the industry's biggest names - by Robert F. Kennedy's Department of Justice, as it violated anti-trust laws. Ironically, Wasserman was a life-long supporter of and fundraiser for the Democratic Party.

In 1979 it acquired ABC Dunhill Records along with its subsidiaries ABC Records, Paramount Records, Impulse Records, Dot Records and Dunhill Records. Chess Records was acquired in 1985, Motown Records was bought in 1988 (and sold to Polygram in 1993). GRP Records and Geffen Records were acquired in 1990. In the same year, the MCA Corporation holding company was purchased by the Matsushita group.

In 1995, Seagram Company Ltd. acquired 80% of MCA and the following year the new owners dropped the MCA name; the company became Universal Studios, Inc. and its music division, MCA Music Entertainment Group, was renamed Universal Music Group. The following year, G. P. Putnam's Sons was sold to the Penguin Group. In 1998 Seagram acquired PolyGram from Philips & merged it with its music holdings. When Seagram's drinks business was brought by France-based Pernod Ricard, its media holdings (including Universal) were sold to Vivendi SA which became Vivendi Universal.

In the spring of 2003, MCA Records was absorbed by Geffen Records. Its country music label, MCA Nashville Records is still in operation.

MCA ran "RadioMOI" Music On Internet company.

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