Press Release | Gütersloh, 12/02/2022

Bertelsmann Revives Christmas Classics

• Hits from the “Vinyl Collection” on social media
• Special showcase starts with “White Christmas”

Gütersloh. December 2, 2022 – No Christmas season would be complete without Christmas carols, especially the great classics. Bertelsmann is now showcasing some of them, pressed on vinyl, on social media. On each of the four Advent Sundays leading up to Christmas, the international media, services, and education group will present short clips of 1950s, “60s, ‘70s and ‘80s Christmas classics from the historic “Vinyl Collection” in Bertelsmann’s corporate archive.

The publicly accessible online record collection is a piece of musical history and heritage. The Christmas special will transfer some treasures from the analog to the digital world of music and make them accessible to a broad audience. Originally created by the Bertelsmann Schallplattenring in the 1950s and continued over the decades, the corporate archive now contains more than 40,000 original vinyl records, of which around 16,000 can be viewed online free of charge in the Vinyl Collection, including works by Peter Alexander and Udo Jürgens, Bob Marley, Boney M., Depeche Mode, and David Bowie.

The “Vinyl Collection” Christmas special kicked off with the song “White Christmas” by beloved actor-singer Bing Crosby. Published in 1945, it was particularly popular in Germany in the 1950s. Because of its cultural and historical significance for the U.S., the original first recording of “White Christmas” was added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress on January 27, 2003. The Bertelsmann Vinyl Collection houses the 1985 reissue from MCA Records (L144).

Information on the record collection with over 30,000 images and scans is available to the public in a separate online database, where interested parties can see what the covers looked like, find out the names of the artists involved, and in which year the special edition was published by the Bertelsmann Clubs.

Everything pertaining to the Vinyl Collection can be found under this link  .

About Bertelsmann
Bertelsmann is a media, services, and education company that operates in about 50 countries around the world. It includes the entertainment group RTL Group, the trade book publisher Penguin Random House, the music company BMG, the service provider Arvato, the Bertelsmann Printing Group, the Bertelsmann Education Group and Bertelsmann Investments, an international network of funds. The company has 145,000 employees and generated revenues of €18.7 billion in the 2021 financial year. Bertelsmann stands for creativity and entrepreneurship. This combination promotes first-class media content and innovative service solutions that inspire customers around the world. Bertelsmann aspires to achieve climate neutrality by 2030.