Warner Bros. - Seven Arts Records

Warner Bros.-Seven Arts (W7 for short) was formed in 1967 when film producer Eliot Hyman's Seven Arts Productions acquired legendary movie mogul Jack L. Warner's controlling interest in Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc. for $95 million and merged with it. The deal included Warner Bros. Records, Reprise Records and the studio's animation unit and the pre-1944 black and white and post-1948 Technicolor Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies cartoon libraries. That same year, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts purchased Atlantic Records from Ahmet Ertegun, his brother Nesuhi Ertegun and Jerry Wexler. Warner Bros.-Seven Arts was acquired in 1969 by Kinney National Company, a parking lot and funeral home operator that entered the entertainment industry in 1967 by acquiring comic book publisher DC Comics (National Periodical Publications as it was formally known at the time), the Ashley-Famous talent agency and Panavision. Warner Bros.-Seven Arts' name was changed to Warner Bros., Inc. in 1970; Kinney sold off its non-entertainment assets after a scandal involving its parking lot business and changed its name to Warner Communications Inc. in 1971. Warner Communications merged with Time Inc. in 1989 to form Time Warner. In 2018, Time Warner changed its name to WarnerMedia. In some European and South American countries, the W7 label continued after it was phased out in America, at least through 1978. Today, the trademark is sometimes used on American and Japanese reissues of recordings from the era. Since 2019, it appears on certain reissues as "Warner - Seven Arts Records" with the W7 logo intact as a result of Warner Music Group losing the license to the "Warner Bros." name. For unofficial / bootleg releases, please use Warner Bros. - Seven Arts Records (2).