Elektra Records Vinyl, CDs & Cassettes

Jac Holzman founded Elektra in 1950 with $300 and a dorm room at St. John's College in Queens, starting with folk music at a time when most of the record industry wasn't paying attention to it. That founding instinct, to find music that mattered before anyone else recognized it, became the defining characteristic of the label across the next seven decades.

The early catalog is rooted in the Greenwich Village folk scene, Judy Collins, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, and a generation of writers who used music as a form of witness. But Holzman had a restless ear, and by the mid-Sixties Elektra had moved toward electric music with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and then fully into rock with the Doors, whose run of albums here remains one of the most concentrated bursts of creative energy in the label's history.

From there, the catalog keeps expanding in directions you wouldn't necessarily predict from the beginning. The Stooges. MC5. Carly Simon. Harry Chapin. Queen found their American audience through Elektra. Metallica built their commercial peak here. The Eagles. The label also founded Nonesuch Records in 1964, which went on to become a legendary institution of its own, and distributed the Mute Records catalog, bringing Depeche Mode and the Cure to American listeners.

Now part of Warner Music Group, Elektra carries more than 75 years of catalog spanning the full arc of American popular music, from the folk revival through hard rock, alternative, and beyond. The common thread across it all is that Holzman and the people who followed him consistently signed artists they believed in before the market caught up.