Gallo Record Company
The oldest record company in South Africa, founded in Johannesburg in 1926.
- Based in
- Johannesburg, South Africa
- Founded
- 1926
- Founder
- Eric Gallo
- Website
- gallo.africa
Gallo Record Company is the oldest record company in South Africa, founded in Johannesburg in 1926 by Eric Gallo as the Brunswick Gramophone House. It built the country’s first recording studio in 1932 and went on to record a large part of twentieth-century South African popular music.
The present company is a hybrid of the original Gallo Africa and the Gramophone Record Company, merged in the 1980s and renamed Gallo Record Company. It is owned by Arena Holdings; in 2022 the producer and DJ Nkosinathi Maphumulo, known as Black Coffee, acquired a significant stake in the business.
Gallo matters mainly as a catalogue owner: it holds one of the deepest archives of recorded South African music, which underpins its licensing and reissue business.
