RCA Red Seal is a classical music label whose origin dates to 1902 and is currently owned by Sony Music. The use of a distinctive red label for premium-priced records made by top-tier artists was a marketing strategy suggested by the Gramophone Company's agent in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the first "Gramophone Record Red Seal" discs were issued in late 1901 or early 1902. Later in 1902 the practice was adopted by the home office in the United Kingdom, which preferred to refer to the records as "Red Labels", and by its United States affiliate, the Victor Talking Machine Company, in 1903. Led by the great tenor Enrico Caruso, then just at the beginning of his worldwide fame, Red Seal records changed the public's valuation of recorded music. Caruso's first records, made by the Gramophone Company in Italy in 1902, earned prestige as well as profits for the company and its affiliates. Victor issued several of these records on their Red Seal label in the United States and soon other famous opera stars and classical instrumentalists were attracted to the studios of Victor and the Gramophone Company, consolidating the positions of both firms as the market leaders in the field of serious music by famous performers. RCA Victor's Red Seal series continued its pre-eminence from the 1930s through the 1950s due partly to the recorded output of three of the leading conductors of the time, Serge Koussevitzky, Leopold Stokowski, and Arturo Toscanini. Nearly all of Toscanini's recordings were issued on the Red Seal label, most of them with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Conductor Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra spent nearly 35 years with RCA Victor and made many best-selling Red Seal recordings. Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra made Red Seal records exclusively from 1917 until 1940. Stokowski would continue to make many Red Seal recordings with various orchestras, sporadically until 1975. (Rondo DB)

Parent label	Sony Music
Labels
Wikipedia	RCA_Red_Seal_Records
Country	United States of America
Started	1902