IASA 2019 Annual Conference

There have been several attempts at researching the history of the record industry in individual countries and to reproduce the various labels. Although Germany was the cradle of the disc record industry from the 1890s and the world’s leading exporter for decades until the last 78s were pressed in 1959, no such overview has yet been undertaken. The paper discusses the problem of locating, reproducing and describing every single type of record label ever manufactured in Germany, including dating them and providing capsule company histories. The coverage includes phantom discs, hearsay discs, picture discs, phono cards, 150 rpm talking doll discs, and other oddities and rarities for both local consumption and export around the world: Europe, Africa, the Near and Middle East, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, North and South America. What's needed is a tool for private and public archives and collections to correctly file any record of German make.