Edison

The Edison Foundation (Edison Stichting) was established in 1983 by the Nederlandse Vereniging van Producenten en Importeurs van beeld- en geluidsdragers (NVPI), the Dutch association of labels. The Foundation is mainly known for the yearly Edison Awards, one of the oldest music awards in the world. The Edison was first awarded in 1960. Only the Grammy Award has a longer history, awarded first in 1959. Besides being the oldest award, the Edison is also the most prestigious music award in the Netherlands. It can be regarded as the Dutch equivalent of the Grammy Awards, the BRIT Awards, the Grand Prix du Disque in France and the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis in Germany. The jury consists of people from the music industry, the music press and music retailers. It has a grand history of huge TV-shows through the years, including the legendary Grand Gala du Disque. Since 1995 the Edison award show is broadcasted as the Edison Music Awards. Besides the "general" Edison Music Award, which is mostly awarded for pop music, since 1998 there are also separate Edisons for jazz and classical music. The Edison award is a bronze replica of a statuette of Thomas Edison, the inventor of the phonograph in 1877, by Dutch sculptor Pieter D'Hont. Besides being responsible for the Edison Awards, the Edison Stichting also incidently releases compilation albums to commemorate special occasions. In 1985 they released "The Greatest Popsongs of the 80's" on 2LP, MC and CD, resulting in the first compilation album released on CD in the Netherlands. In 1989 they released the "25 Jaar Top 40" series, to commemorate the 25th birthday of the most popular Dutch chart at the time, the Top 40. The series was a unique at the time. It consisted of 7 volumes, released on MC, LP and CD, including the highlights of 25 years of pop music. It was only available for a limited period of time. The CD releases each consisted of 2 or 3 CD's. Never before had a project been released on such large scale on CD, and it was very difficult to find a CD plant able to produce the large amount of CD's in short time. The series was also unique in another way as it included many major artists like Madonna, Prince and Michael Jackson, who seldomly approved inclusion of their songs on compilation albums. At the end of 1989 volume 8 of the series was released. While the other volumes included tracks from 1965 up until 1988, volume 8 completed the series with the major hits of 1989.