It oversaw EMI's various labels, including The Gramophone Co. Ltd., Columbia Graphophone Company, and Parlophone Co. Ltd.[6] The global success that EMI enjoyed in the 1960s exposed the fact that the company had the rights to only some of its trademarks in some parts of the world, most notably His Master's Voice and Columbia, with RCA Victor and the American Columbia Records, respectively, owning the rights to these trademarks in the Western Hemisphere.

Complicating matters was Columbia's formation of its own operations in the UK by purchasing Oriole Records and changing its name to that of its then-parent company CBS (the legal trademark designation bearing the full name of the parent company, "Trade Mark of Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc."), and as CBS Records International becoming highly successful, a serious rival to EMI, in the UK.

EMI Records then signed new music artists that became worldwide successes: Kraftwerk, Renaissance, Queen, Olivia Newton-John, Iron Maiden, Kate Bush, Sheena Easton, and Pink Floyd (though some of these acts were on different labels in the US, not EMI's Capitol Records).

[12] Australia's most prolific artist, Slim Dusty, signed with the Columbia Graphophone Co. for Regal Zonophone Records in 1946 and remained with EMI until his death in 2003, selling over seven million records for the label in Australia by 2007.

[14] The reissues of pre-1997 releases from EMI America and EMI Records USA are handled by UMG's Capitol Music Group, Virgin Records' American distributor and a stand-alone British distributor.

The distributors of the vast majority of EMI Records' UK catalogue are Rhino Entertainment in the US and WEA International for the world outside the US.

Since 2018, Takeshi Okada has been the managing director of Universal Japan's EMI Records label.

[19] In July 2023, Universal Japan announced a new imprint label, Holo-n, which will operate under their EMI Records division in partnership with Hololive Production.