The first American original cast recording as we know it was an early experimental LP of program transcriptions of selections from The Band Wagon, a 1931 revue starring Fred and Adele Astaire.
This album featured Helen Morgan and Paul Robeson doing their songs from the show but used studio cast singers for the leads.
Decca riposted with another album of the same highlights sung by the actual stars of the original production, although recorded five years after the premiere.
Decca soon began recording every hit musical that came along including One Touch of Venus, Carmen Jones, Carousel, and Annie Get Your Gun.
Columbia Masterworks produced the original cast recordings of such shows as The Pajama Game, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, West Side Story, Gypsy, and Camelot.
In the early days, the studio cast singers were often lesser known performers with good singing voices, usually joined by one fairly well known star.
Mary Martin made a number of studio cast recordings for Columbia in the early 1950s including Babes in Arms, Girl Crazy, and Anything Goes.
More recent studio albums have tended to be note-complete recreations of the original orchestrations, often with well-known singers (not infrequently from the world of opera rather than musical theatre) taking the leads: such as EMI's recordings of Brigadoon and Show Boat.
Soundtrack and cast albums sometimes have much in common, especially when the film concerned is a motion picture version of an original stage musical, and it often makes sense for record shops to put the two genres in the same section.
They released 78-rpm album sets of Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma!, A Connecticut Yankee, One Touch of Venus, Carmen Jones, Bloomer Girl, Song of Norway, Carousel, Annie Get Your Gun, Call Me Mister, and Lost in the Stars.
The label added more titles to their cast album library in the early 1950s: Guys and Dolls, The King and I, Wonderful Town, Seventh Heaven, On Your Toes, and Anchors Aweigh.
Decca Broadway has also recorded recent hits including: Wicked, Monty Python's Spamalot, Seussical, and Spring Awakening.
It has not, however, released the London cast album of Man of La Mancha on CD, perhaps because it contains most of the dialogue from the show, and the film version is readily available on DVD.
The 1960s found them with recording rights to a number of minor hits: No Strings, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, and Golden Boy but mostly they got flop shows: Sail Away, Kwamina, The Gay Life, Skyscraper, Walking Happy, and Zorba.
The label executives complained that "cast albums don't sell" ignoring the ongoing success of Funny Girl and The Music Man and the fact that many of their shows had been outright flops.
RCA Victor entered the cast album field in 1947 with two hits and a miss: Brigadoon, High Button Shoes, and Rodgers & Hammerstein's Allegro.
Their first LP release was Irving Berlin's Call Me Madam but because the star Ethel Merman was under contract to Decca, she was replaced on Victor's album by Dinah Shore.
Victor did better with Paint Your Wagon, and Damn Yankees, but had their share of flops: Seventeen, Make a Wish, Hazel Flagg, and Pipe Dream, along with minor hits Me and Juliet, Happy Hunting, New Girl in Town, Jamaica, Redhead, Take Me Along, Do Re Mi, Wildcat, and Milk and Honey.
During this time it also released five of the cast albums from the Music Theatre of Lincoln Center revivals, The Merry Widow with Patrice Munsel, Show Boat with Barbara Cook, Constance Towers, Stephen Douglass, David Wayne, and William Warfield, Kismet with Alfred Drake, Annie Get Your Gun with Ethel Merman, Carousel with John Raitt, and The King and I with Rise Stevens and Darren McGavin.
At this time Bill Rosenfield used RCA Victor to re-release the label's vast catalogue of show albums on CD and to record new shows including: Into The Woods, Jerome Robbins' Broadway, Grand Hotel, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Titanic, Steel Pier, Ragtime, Fosse, The Full Monty, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Urinetown, and Avenue Q.
As a result, Columbia's albums of Kismet, The Pajama Game, Bells Are Ringing, and Flower Drum Song remain classics in the field.
The label later offered the film soundtrack and a 1976 20th anniversary revival cast albums as well as recordings in French, Italian, Spanish and Hebrew.
The label recorded Frank Loesser's near sung-through musical The Most Happy Fella, virtually complete and issued it as a 3-record set as well as a single Lp of highlights.
David Serero Records - the French baritone produced and arranged on his own label the only Broadway musical by Duke Ellington: Beggar's Holiday.
The King and I, Calamity Jane, Guys and Dolls, Annie Get Your Gun, and My Fair Lady (which won a Grammy Award) have all been produced on the Masterworks edition label.
Their most famous Broadway album is the 1965 original cast recording of Man of La Mancha, starring Richard Kiley and Joan Diener.
PS Classics – A substantial catalogue of cast albums including Grey Gardens, A Year with Frog and Toad and the revivals of 110 In the Shade, Fiddler on the Roof, Company, Assassins, and Nine.
They have won three Grammy Awards for In the Heights, The Book of Mormon, and Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, and also released albums of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Legally Blonde: The Musical, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Vanities, The Drowsy Chaperone, Everyday Rapture, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and the 2011 Broadway revival of Anything Goes.
Original Cast Recordings include: Love Birds, Soho Cinders, Sleeping Arrangements, Ushers: The Front of House Musical, and A Spoonful of Sherman.
Varèse Sarabande – Established as a label for movie scores, they did branch out into cast albums in the 1990s recording a number of Broadway and off-Broadway shows.