75 Years of Atlantic Records

Rock, pop and soul icons play to the camera.

In 1947, when Ahmet Ertegun and two fellow music fans started Atlantic Records in New York City, they never could have known that their passion for discovering artists and making records would shape 75 years of popular culture. The reason for such tremendous global success is simple: Atlantic is a groundbreaking industry model that embraced and championed a wide range of genres: Black music like R&B, soul, jazz, and hip-hop, as well as rock, pop, dance, and more.

75 Years of Atlantic Records is the official and definitive photographic history of this legendary record label; four years in the making, and featuring images from Atlantic’s extensive archives, many of them published here for the first time. Check out soul pioneers like Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles; jazz innovators like John Coltrane and Charles Mingus; era-defining pop acts like the Bee Gees and ABBA; rock legends like Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones; trailblazing singers like Roberta Flack, and Stevie Nicks, and today’s stars like Ed Sheeran and Charli xcx. Presented in formal portraits, live performance shots, decisive moments in the studio, and intimate glimpses behind the scenes are captured by some of the world’s greatest photographers, including Annie Leibovitz, Jim Marshall, Lee Friedlander, Walter Iooss Jr., Anton Corbijn, Chuck Stewart, Albert Watson and David LaChapelle.  

Fascinating captions by Richie Unterberger and Herb Powell provide context while award-winning writers David Ritz, Ben Ratliff, Elizabeth Nelson, Barney Hoskyns and others examine the label’s various genres, alongside a timeline and profiles of the label’s pioneers. A foreword by Bruno Mars declares that Atlantic revolutionized how records were made and heard. Now this story has been fully and beautifully documented—a must-have for music lovers.