Beat Factory

Beat Factory
Founded	1982 (1982)
Founder	Ivan Berry Rupert Gayle
Status	Defunct
Genre	Hip hop, R&B, reggae
Country of origin	Canada
Location	Toronto, Ontario

Beat Factory was a Canadian urban music management and production company, and later, an independent record label, based in Toronto, Ontario.

In 1982, Beat Factory was founded by Ivan Berry and songwriter Rupert Gayle. Throughout the 1980s and '90s, Beat Factory managed the top urban music artists in Canada. In 1988, Berry signed Michie Mee to an international record deal with Atlantic Records, making her the first Canadian hip hop artist signed to a major label. Beat Factory's biggest success was the Dream Warriors, who sold 800,000 copies of their debut album And Now the Legacy Begins, released in 1991.^[1]

In 1996, Berry founded Beat Factory Music Inc., a record label division of Beat Factory, distributed by EMI Music Canada and BMG Music Canada. The label released a series of compilation albums, known as RapEssentials and GroovEssentials.^[2] These albums included the first singles by Kardinal Offishall and Glenn Lewis, both of whom became prominent artists in the 2000s.

See also

• List of record labels

References

1. Canadian Music Week 2004 Archived 2009-11-10 at the Wayback Machine
2. "About Ivan Berry" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-14. Retrieved 2009-01-02.