Division of the World Record Club, active in Australia and New Zealand from 1960 until the late 1970s. The UK label of the same name was not associated with World Record Club there - please use The Record Society (2). In the UK, the same releases simply appeared on the World Record club label (e.g Anton Bruckner / Herbert von Karajan, Berliner Philharmoniker - Symphony No. 8 In C Minor vs Anton Bruckner / Berliner Philharmoniker Conductor: Herbert von Karajan - Symphony No. 8. Many Record Society releases also appeared on LPs of the Musical Heritage Society label - unknown if the was a formal link.
Australia
The Record Society was a club in its own right, although the World Record Club advertised and sold Record Society releases through its monthly magazines throughout the 1960s. A small monthly programme of its own was also mailed to Record Society members. The earliest LPs have the company as "The Record Society Pty. Ltd", but by the end of 1960, it was shown as "The Record Society (Aust.) Pty. Ltd".
In the early 1970s, membership was opened for a couple of months every year, with adverts giving summaries of the year's programme (helpfully listing the composers in the same order as the release sequence), which ran from July one year to June the next.
From 1975, WRC gradually began absorbing the label. Catalogues listed Record Society albums alongside and among the WRC albums (the only differentiation was "R/S" next to Record Society albums in the catalogues). The label was increasingly described as "a division of World Record Club" on the sleeves of LPs (e.g. S-6449), and eventually, sleeves tended to only feature the World Record Club name and logo, only mentioning The Record Society on the LP labels. From 1978, the label no longer appeared in WRC catalogues, and, although old sleeve designs may have been re-used, the label was effectively defunct.
The label featured slightly more specialised/esoteric/obscure material than the World Record Club, but there's no clear-cut distinction - as WRC's output increased, the distinction became increasingly tenuous, which WRC acknowledged. Early releases followed a numbering pattern with the last two digits being used as a prefix (e.g. 37-6037 for 6037), and invariably were issued as gatefolds, with the sleeve opening along the centre of the gatefold. Many early LPs had an alternative design, with a horizontal obi over a plain sleeve. In June 1963, the numbering changed to "RS" (or "S/" or "No." depending on which part of the sleeve one looked at). In July 1966, the multiple WRC address combinations of the time were put on the back (until then, "330 [later [no number] > 393 > 299] Flinders Lane Melbourne" had been in use, while regular WRC releases stopped using this single address in 1960). In July 1968, with S/6272, release numbers were changed to the WRC standard (i.e. S/6272 instead of RS 6272), and mono LPs were dropped, along with the gatefold covers, allowing a ~20% price reduction (from $4.25 to $3.50).
The label design incorporated the triangular logo, with mono releases in grey/pink and stereo in grey/green. In July 1965, the brown 'herald' design was introduced, which (in blue) was to become the standard label for World Record Club in 1971.
New Zealand
At first, New Zealand and Australian releases used the same numbers for their releases (with different prefixes - RZ and SRZ) for a few years, but they diverged in around 1967. The label design was almost the same as the Australian mono one (the same colour scheme was used for both mono and stereo), and in New Zealand, it lasted well into the 1970s, switching to the black/orange 'strobe' design used for regular New Zealand World Record Club releases in about 1976. As in Australia, the label gradually merged with its parent.
