Melodiya

the All-Union phonograph record firm of the Ministry of Culture of the USSR.

Melodiya was founded in 1964. The firm manages the creative and industrial enterprises and organizations that record, manufacture, and distribute records and cassette tapes. In 1973, the firm controlled creative studios that manufacture original molds for the production of the records, create original works for recording, and restore historical recordings of a documentary nature and other unique recordings of the past. These studios are located in Moscow, Leningrad, Rīga (branch in Tallinn), Vilnius, Tbilisi, Alma-Ata, and Tashkent. Melodiya has factories in the towns of Aprelevka in Moscow Oblast, Leningrad, Rīga, and Tashkent; the Aprelevka Order of Lenin Factory, which was founded in 1910 and produces about 65 million records annually, is the firm’s largest enterprise. The firm has record shops in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Rīga, Tashkent, Alma-Ata, Tbilisi, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Kuibyshev, Khabarovsk, Rostov-on-Don, and Aktiubinsk.

Every year, Melodiya issues about 1,200 new stereophonic and monophonic titles (including soft plastic records, issued as sepa-rate records and as “recorded pages”supplementing the journals Krugozor and Kolobok, and as appendixes to books and journals), with a total volume of 190-200 million records and around 1 million cassette tapes (1973). Once in two or three years, Melodiya publishes catalogs of all its records, and on a quarterly basis, catalogs of new recordings. Melodiya’s records and tapes are exported to more than 70 countries. Many of its recordings have won international prizes.