Compo Company
Canadian record company
Compo Company Ltd. was Canada's first independent record company.
The Compo Company was founded in 1918 in Lachine, Quebec, by Herbert Berliner, an executive of Berliner Gramophone of Canada and the oldest son of disc record inventor Emile Berliner.
Compo was created to serve the several American independent record companies which wanted to distribute records in Canada, such as Okeh Records. Its initial business was pressing records in Canada for these companies. Herbert Berliner broke with Berliner Gramophone in 1921, taking several senior Berliner Gramophone executives with him. This allowed Compo to immediately expand into a full-fledged record company by establishing the Sun and Apex record labels, among others. Apex was the longest lasting of the Compo labels, lasting into the 1970s.
Compo was one of only two Canadian record companies to survive the Great Depression. RCA Victor Records of Canada—formerly Berliner Gramophone—was the other (it is currently the oldest Canadian label that forms part of Sony Music Entertainment in Canada).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Compo Company” is canadian record company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Compo, Company and Canadian, not as a finished interpretation.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5156678. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1918 and 1921.
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This entry incorporates text from “Compo Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.