That year Columbia Graphophone in the UK merged with the Gramophone Company (which sold records under the His Master's Voice label) to form EMI.

In 1901, Columbia began selling disc records (invented and patented by Emile Berliner of the Victor Talking Machine Company) and phonographs.

Its headquarters and studios were established in Victorian warehouses at 102-108 Clerkenwell Road shortly before the First World War, and the buildings were a key location in the development of the British recording industry until the 1930s.

[6] Louis Sterling as Managing Director had turned around the fortunes of UK Columbia, and persuaded Western Electric that granting a monopoly would be a grave mistake.

[4] Satisfied with the progress of the test recordings, in March 1925, Louis Sterling (backed by J.P. Morgan & Co.), acquired a controlling interest in the parent company, Columbia US, for $2.5 million (about £500,000) in order to take advantage of Western Electric's patents.

By late 1930, he had developed a recording system including a moving-coil microphone and a cutting head with linear characteristics which circumvented Western Electric's patents.

[12][13][14] By the time of the merger, the Gramophone Company had not fully developed an alternative to Western Electric's process and was still paying royalty fees, so it was a technically advantageous move.

The loss of American Columbia product had forced UK Columbia to groom its own talent[16] such as Russ Conway, John Barry, Cliff Richard, the Shadows, Helen Shapiro, Frank Ifield, Freddie and the Dreamers, the Dave Clark Five, Shirley Bassey, Frankie Vaughan, Des O'Connor, Ken Dodd, the Animals, Herman's Hermits, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Seekers, the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck, and Pink Floyd.

[17] Led by A&R man Norrie Paramor, the label was arguably the most successful in Britain in the rock era prior to the beat boom.

However, the "magic notes" logo is occasionally used, usually to give a 'retro' feel (such as on the 2016 vinyl reissues of Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets, and on Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind).

The Columbia name was still on some EMI releases between 1973 and 1990 (such as Baltimora's "Tarzan Boy" in 1985,[26] Jeanne Mas and the 1987 Kiki Dee album Angel Eyes),[27][28] but it had ceased acting as a fully functioning label.