Lion Music
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Lion Music is a production company and record label.
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[edit] Overview
Lion Music was founded in 1989 as a production company for the composer and artist Lars Eric Mattsson to handle production and licensing businesses in Europe, USA and Asia where a number of deals were signed. At that time it was never intended that Lion Music would become the record label that it has since evolved into today.
After some serious problems with certain labels in the early 90s, Lars decided to take a few years off and concentrated on the building of his own studio as well as a number of other things.
[edit] Evolution into a record label
In 1997, the dream of starting a new label had become very strong, mostly because of problems Lar's faced when dealing with certain other companies. The first releases were “Vision “Till the End of Time” (1997), reissues of Lars Eric Mattsson’s “No Surrender” and Vision’s debut album (1998) as well as Lars’ new album “Obsession” (his first solo album in 7 years) but it took another 2 years until the official birth of the label.
In January 2000, Lion Music released 2 albums at the same time, Alex Masi’s “In the Name of Bach” and Matssons “Another Dimension” and this has to be considered the real start of Lion Music as a record label.
[edit] Branching out
Since this period, Lion Music has operated as a real record label with regular releases and seen its roster of artists grow considerably, offering more varied musical genres and styles. They are now considered a leading force within progressive and power metal circles as well being closely associated with the instrumental and virtuoso musician releases - a genre overlooked by most other labels. Lion Music have recently branched out into other genres such AOR/Melodic hard rock, Fusion and classic hard rock.
Lion Music has also released several well received quality tribute albums to Jason Becker, Shawn Lane, Ritchie Blackmore, Jimi Hendrix, Uli Jon Roth and Gary Moore. Lion Music's current release schedule sees an average of 3 to 4 new albums each month.