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Using data to find out when EMI moved from Barcelona to Madrid

I am going to deviate from my usual path a bit, mostly to show the power of having a lot of (correct) data. At some point in the 1980s EMI moved its Spanish office from Barcelona to Madrid. I wanted to see if I could pinpoint when this happened.

According to the EMI-Odeon label page on Discogs there were a few addresses in/around Barcelona and one in Madrid. What I noticed when looking at labels of EMI releases is that at some point a few things in the label designs and on the sleeves changed:

  1. the region for the depósito legal
  2. the name of the company
  3. the address of the company
An example of a release with the old address is Duran Duran's "Hungry Like The Wolf" from 1982. An example of a release with the new address is Duran Duran's "Ordinary World" from 1993. So the change of address must have happened sometime between those two releases, but when exactly?

I took the data dump released in June 2019 as a basis, extracted all the Spanish releases and filtered the EMI and Harvest (a sublabel) releases with depósito legal values and then looked at the year component of the depósito legal.

The data has nearly 5500 EMI releases (excluding many of the sublabels like Harvest and Odeon), of which a bit over 1720 have a proper depósito legal field. I also looked at 200 Harvest releases. Although there still is quite a bit of work to be done filling in missing data, but I was still able to make a very good guess: EMI moved offices in June 1985. Update: this seems to be correct, as on May 16 1985 it was reported that EMI had bought Hispavox, which was based in Madrid and that the Hispavox infrastructure would be used.

Assuming that the depósito legal values are assigned incrementally and the releases were not delayed, then the latest release from the Barcelona office is (as far as I know) "Rock & Roll Circus" by Orquesta Mandragón. There could of course be later releases, but these are not in the database with a (valid) depósito legal field.

The first EMI releases with a depósito legal from Madrid that I could find are a compilation album named "Tarzan Boy" and Marillion's "Kayleigh". The first Harvest release I can find is The Scorpions' "World Wide Live" which was released in June 1985 and has a depósito legal very close to the "Tarzan Boy" compilation album. Of course, there could be earlier releases with a depósito legal from Madrid.

There are a few exceptions to the rule (as always). Releases on EMI Classics seem to have been released with a depósito legal from 1997 or 1998 (example 1, example 2) but these seem to be special productions for the Ediciones Altaya label. There were also some releases (example 1, example 2) for Editorial Planeta DeAgostini, S.A. and in 2008 the whole "Colección Queen" (which was released by some Spanish newspapers) was released with depósito legal numbers from Barcelona.

I found one other exception, with a depósito legal number from Madrid dating from before the move, namely a promo flexidisc (Casal/Duran Duran). I have no idea why this particular release was deposited in Madrid.

One very odd release with both a Barcelona and Madrid depósito legal number is a cassette version of Iron Maiden's "Powerslave" album from 1984: the sleeve has a depósito legal from Barcelona, the cassette has one from Madrid. Apart from that they are identical, so it is immediately clear that someone made a mistake. Given that the address on the sleeve is in Barcelona I would say that likely the one on the sleeve is the correct one.

Apart from those I can add some more patterns to my list of sanity checks for releases: EMI releases with a depósito legal from Barcelona later than 1985 are very likely a mistake as are EMI releases with a depósito legal from Madrid earlier than 1985.

Of course, there were data entry errors in the Discogs database which were fixed as much as possible.

Concluding: given enough data a lot of interesting information can be found.
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