Who is head of RCA Records?
RCA Music Group
In mid-2011, Sony announced that they were again restructuring RCA/JIVE Label Group. The JIVE side split, and LA Reid was hired to head Epic Records, which was restructured to focus on urban music. JIVE Records was moved under RCA Music Group, minus those artists who were moved to Epic. Some of JIVE's urban artists such as Usher moved to RCA, while other JIVE pop artists, including Britney Spears & P!nk, stayed under JIVE as the label moved under the RCA Music Group. Peter Edge serves as CEO of the company. The company was expected to start releasing all of its recordings under RCA Records. Arista Records, J Records and JIVE Records have been shut down in October 2011 with all of their artists moving to RCA. In August 2011, RCA laid off 20 members of its staff.
RCA Victrola
Victrola also went well back into the RCA Victor archives to issue tributes to various operatic singers, as well as groups of singers. Several complete operas, including Erich Leinsdorf's famous Rome sessions, which began with the 1957 stereo recording of Puccini's "Tosca" with Zinka Milanov, Jussi Björling, and Leonard Warren, were also reissued.
Victrola released a number of compilations of operatic recordings, taken mostly from 78-rpm "Red Seal" discs. RCA Victor had an extensive catalog of operatic recordings by famous singers from opera's golden age, dating back to its beginnings as the Victor Talking Machine Company in the early 1900s. The most famous recordings were by the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso; all of his recordings were made by the acoustical recording process before Victor began commercial electrical recording in 1925. There were a number of Victrola albums devoted to a single singer such as Caruso, Richard Crooks, Lawrence Tibbett, Rosa Ponselle, Ezio Pinza, John McCormack, Titta Ruffo, Amelita Galli-Curci, Lauritz Melchior, and Kirsten Flagstad, as well as compilations devoted to the French, German, and Italian operas. Although these albums were released before the advent of digital remastering, great care was taken to achieve the best possible sound through various electronic processes available in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1976, some of Caruso's recordings were among the first to be digitally remastered, using a ground-breaking process developed by Thomas G. Stockham at the University of Utah, and RCA began a project to reissue all of Caruso's recordings on the RCA Red Seal label.