The Library of Congress National Jukebox is a collaborative project of several organizations and even individual record collectors. While the future expansion of the site is expected to bring many additional partners, these founding contributors have been crucial to making the National Jukebox a reality.
Sony Music Entertainment
In 2008, Sony Music Entertainment granted the Library of Congress an unprecedented gratis license to stream over the internet all of the pre-1925 recordings in their catalog, including those of the Victor, Columbia and Okeh labels. The agreement between Sony Music Entertainment and the Library of Congress is the founding charter of the National Jukebox project. The Jukebox would not be possible without the generosity and support of Sony Music Entertainment.
Sony Music Entertainment is a global recorded music company with a current roster that includes a broad array of both local artists and international superstars. The company boasts a vast catalog with some of the most important recordings in history. It is home to premier record labels representing music from every genre, including American Recordings, Arista Nashville, Arista Records, Battery Records, Beach Street Records, BNA Records, Columbia Nashville, Columbia Records, Day 1, Epic Records, Essential Records, Flicker Records, J Records, Jive Records, LaFace Records, Legacy Recordings, MASTERWORKS, Polo Grounds, RCA Records, RCA Nashville, RCA Red Seal, RCA Victor, Reunion Records, Roc Nation, Sony Classical, Sony Music Latin, Star Time International, Verity Gospel Music Group, and Volcano Entertainment. Sony Music Entertainment is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America.
University of California, Santa Barbara. Davidson Library, Department of Special Collections
The contributions of the UCSB Davidson Library Department of Special Collections have had a profound impact on the National Jukebox project. Data provided to the Library of Congress from their online Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Records serve as source cataloging for virtually all of the recordings in the National Jukebox. They collaborated closely with the Library of Congress on the digitization of over 5,000 of their Victor discs for this project, and continue to serve as expert advisers in the ongoing planning and development of the National Jukebox.
EMI Music, Inc.
EMI Music granted the Library of Congress permission to include in the National Jukebox hundreds of Victor recordings that derive from masters recorded in Europe by the Gramophone Company.
David Giovannoni and Mark Lynch
Record collectors David Giovannoni and Mark Lynch contributed more than 800 rare and very early Victor recordings to the National Jukebox project. These recordings, not held by the Library of Congress or the University of California, Santa Barbara, make a remarkable body of very early commercial disc recordings publicly available for the first time in over a century.
The Giovannoni-Lynch Collection of Victor Pre-Matrix Recordings contains nearly 2,000 commercial American sound recordings produced between 1900 and 1903. It offers a rich sampling of artists including Sousa’s Band; instrumental soloists at the peak of their powers; stars of the music hall, variety, and operatic stages; and some of the first African-Americans to make recordings. These discs are quite rare as typically only a few hundred copies of any performance were pressed. The Library of Congress is very grateful to David Giovannoni and Mark Lynch, the two individuals who assembled and curated the collection, for their generosity in sharing the collection through the National Jukebox.
