Victor Red Seal

Red Seal began as an import: the Gramophone Company's red-label celebrity discs, cut in Europe for singers who would not otherwise have gone near a recording horn. Victor took the idea for America in 1903, and for twenty years the red label meant a single-sided disc, a premium price, and a name from the opera house rather than the vaudeville stage.

Enrico Caruso is the reason the series worked. His voice suited the acoustic process better than almost any other — loud, even, and rich in the middle where the horn was most sensitive — and the records sold in numbers nobody had expected from serious music. Nellie Melba, Marcella Sembrich, Fritz Kreisler and the young Sergei Rachmaninoff followed.

Red Seals stayed single-sided long after the rest of the industry had gone to two, on the theory that a great performance should not have to share a disc. Double-sided Red Seals arrived in the early 1920s once the prices could no longer be defended.