In the music industry, a record label is a brand and a trademark associated with the marketing of music recordings and music videos. In everyday usage, a record label is also a company that manages such brands and trademarks coordinates the production, manufacture, distribution, promotion, and enforcement of copyright protection of sound recordings and music videos conducts A&R and maintains contracts with recording artists and their managers. Record labels may be small, localized, and "independent", or they may be part of a large international media group, or somewhere in between. Generally, recorded music needs a record label in order to be widely known, reviewed, heard on media outlets such as radio or television, and in order to be available to buy in stores, although the Internet has changed this to some extent.

The name, "record label", refers to the usually papered and cut center area of a vinyl recording that prominently displays the manufacturer's name, along with other pertinent information. Many 7" vinyl singles were pressed with a relief in lieu of the paper label, particularly in Great Britain.

A record label that is a part of a larger record company that also operates as a record label, might be referred to a sublabel of its parent record label.

The next major technical development was the invention of the gramophone disc, generally credited to Emile Berliner and commercially introduced in the United States in 1889.

Discs were easier to manufacture, transport and store, and they had the additional benefit of being louder (marginally) than cylinders, which by necessity, were single-sided. Sales of the Gramophone record overtook the cylinder ca. 1910, and by the end of World War I the disc had become the dominant commercial recording format. In various permutations, the audio disc format became the primary medium for consumer sound recordings until the end of the 20th century, and the double-sided 78rpm shellac disc was the standard consumer music format from the early 1910s to the late 1950s.

Although there was no universally accepted speed, and various companies offered discs that played at several different speeds, the major recording companies eventually settled on a de facto industry standard of 78 revolutions per minute, which gave the disc format its common nickname, the "seventy-eight". Discs were made of shellac or similar brittle plastic like materials, played with metal needles, and had a distinctly limited life.