MOSCOW — Russia has privatized Melodia, the country's oldest state-run record label and the owner of Russia's largest music library.
ForMaks intends to work on broadening the audience for Melodia's library of about 240,000 recordings by increasing revenues from digital rates, attracting new listeners and broadening the label's geographic reach,. The acquisition"is a logical continuation of our efforts aimed at building up our catalog."
By the early 1990s, the label had released about 49,000 titles and was among the world's top-six record companies, according to the Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound. In recent years, Melodia mostly focused on reissuing recordings from its catalog and licensing tracks from its library. Some of Melodia's records have been available to North American listeners since 2008 through the Canadian classical label Analekta.