MCA Inc.(Universal Studios, Inc) - Delaware

Beautiful engraved SCARCE specimen certificate from MCA Inc (Music Corporation of America ) dated in 1988. This historic document was printed by United States Bank Note Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of two allegorical men next to a globe. This item has the printed signatures of the Company's President, Lew Wasserman and Secretary and is over 19 years old.


Certificate Vignette

The Music Corporation of America (commonly known simply as MCA) was an American corporation in the music and television businesses. The successor company is Universal Music Group. MCA published music, booked acts, ran a record label, and distributed television productions and home videos.

MCA was founded as a music booking agency based in Chicago, Illinois in 1924 by Jules Stein. MCA helped pioneer modern practices of touring bands and name acts. Prominent early MCA booked artists included King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton.

Lew Wasserman rose through the ranks to MCA for more than four decades, with Sonny Werblin as his right-hand man. Other executives within MCA were Presidents, Sidney Sheinberg and Lawrence R. Barnett, and Ned Tanen, head of Universal Pictures. Tanen was behind Universal hits such as "Animal House," and John Hughes's "Sixteen Candles" and "The Breakfast Club."

Wasserman expanded the company's presence into television (founding EMKA, Ltd., which owns Paramount Pictures's pre-1948 film library and Revue Studios, the top supplier of television for all broadcast networks, spanning three decades). He also purchased the Universal Studios studio lot, but not the studio itself, in 1958.

MCA entered the record music business in 1962 with the purchase of the New York based US Decca branch, including Coral Records and Brunswick Records. As Decca owned Universal Pictures, MCA assumed full ownership of Universal and made it into the top film studio in town, producing hit after hit. In order to acquire Universal, Wasserman was forced to dissolve MCA's talent agency in 1962 - which represented most of the industry's biggest names - by Robert F. Kennedy's Department of Justice, as it violated anti-trust laws. Ironically, Wasserman was a life-long supporter of and fundraiser for the Democratic Party. In 1966, MCA formed Uni Records in Universal City, California and in 1967, MCA bought New York based Kapp Records. In 1968, The MCA record label was established outside North America to issue releases by MCA's labels. Kapp and Uni were merged into MCA Records in 1971; the two labels maintained their identities for a short time but were soon retired in favor of the MCA label. The first MCA Records release in the US was former Uni artist Elton John's Crocodile Rock in 1972. In 1973, the Decca label was also folded into MCA Records. In 1975, the company entered the book publishing business with the acquisition of G. P. Putnam's Sons.

In 1979 it acquired ABC Dunhill Records along with its subsidiaries ABC Records, Paramount Records, Impulse Records, Dot Records and Dunhill Records. Chess Records was acquired in 1985. Motown Records was bought in 1988 (and sold to PolyGram in 1993). GRP Records and Geffen Records were acquired in 1990. In the same year, the MCA Inc holding company was purchased by the Matsushita group. In 1989 Dannii Minogue signed with MCA (uk). Subsequently she enjoyed success. The fabulous Ruth Joy was also signed to MCA, as a solo artist (1989-1992).

In 1995, Seagram Company Ltd. acquired 80% of MCA and the following year the new owners dropped the MCA name; the company became Universal Studios, Inc. and its music division, MCA Music Entertainment Group, was renamed Universal Music Group. The following year, G. P. Putnam's Sons was sold to the Penguin Group. In 1998 Seagram acquired PolyGram from Philips & merged it with its music holdings. When Seagram's drinks business was bought by France-based Pernod Ricard, its media holdings (including Universal) were sold to Vivendi SA which became Vivendi Universal.

In the spring of 2003, MCA Records was absorbed by Geffen Records. Its country music label, MCA Nashville Records is still in operation. MCA's classical music catalogue is managed by Deutsche Grammophon.

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Lew Wasserman (March 15, 1913 - June 3, 2002) was a Hollywood agent and studio executive credited with first creating and then taking apart the studio system in a career spanning more than six decades. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants in Cleveland, Ohio, Wasserman started out as a booking agent for the Music Corporation of America (MCA) under its founder Dr. Jules Stein.

Under Wasserman's watch, MCA branched out into representing actors and actresses in addition to musicians and in the process created the studio system, which drove up prices for studios. As an agency, Wasserman's MCA came to dominate Hollywood, representing such stars as Bette Davis and Ronald Reagan, whom Wasserman would later help become president of the Screen Actors Guild.

Following the rising postwar popularity of television and the resulting near bankruptcy of many studios, Wasserman purchased Universal Studios from Decca Records in 1958 and merged it with MCA in 1962. In 1966, he singlehandedly installed Jack Valenti as head of the MPAA. He ran the combined company for nearly thirty years before selling it to Japanese consumer electronics conglomerate Matsushita Electric in 1990.

Wasserman pocketed an estimated 350 million dollars from the sale and remained as manager until Seagram bought a controlling interest in 1995. Wasserman served on the board of directors until 1998. He died in Beverly Hills in 2002 and was interred in Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City.

History from Wikipeida and OldCompanyResearch.com.

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About Specimens

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates we made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.

These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that grown in popularity over the past several years.