Music Institutions

Universal Music Group
Universal Music Group (UMG) is an American-based but French-owned multinational music corporation and its head quarters are in Santa Monica California. It was founded in 1934 as DECCA Records USA, Universal Music Group is the worlds largest music content company. UMG also owns the copyrights to the musical compositions so they can do public performances, recording and for film advertising. UMG has worked with many successful artists such as snow patrol and Rihanna. Universal Music Group is situated in New York where it also manages other labels such as Decca Records, Island Record sand Def Jam Recordings, it also owns Universal Music Publishing Group which is the second largest publishing company in the world.

Warner Music Group
Warner Music Group (WMG) is an American global record company based in New York and is the largest American owned music conglomerate in the world. It was founded in 1958 the company owns some of the largest and most successful record labels including Warner Bros Records, Parlophone Records and Atlantic Records. In may 2011 WMG announced its sale to Access Industries and with a multi million dollar turnover WMG has operations in more that 50 countries world wide. In 2008 WMG had troubles with Youtube, they wanted more money for the music videos they uploaded to the site but Youtube said no and WMG took all their videos off Youtube, later in 2009 They agreed on a new amount of money.

EMI
EMI was a British multinational music recording and publishing company whose headquarters were in London. EMI was founded in 1931 as the electric and music industries and was the smallest institution  in the big four. The original founder of EMI was the inventor of the gramophone, Emile Berliner and some of its record labels included Angel Records, Blue note Records and Virgin Records. They recently closed down in 2012 but they were the forth largest business group in the world, some of its record labels included EMI Records, parlophone and capital Records. EMI had financial troubles with $4 billion worth of debt and they sold their music arm to the Universal Music Group in 2011 for $1.9 billion.