Jive Records

Jive Records is an American record label owned by Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. Clive Calder originally founded the label in 1981 as a subsidiary of the Zomba Group. In the US, the label had offices in New York City and Chicago. Jive was best known for its successes with hip-hop, R&B, and dance acts in the 1980s and 1990s, along with teen pop and boy bands during the late 1990s and early 2000s, including most famously Britney Spears. Jive was acquired by Bertelsmann Music Group in 2002. In October 2008, BMG relaunched after the end of the merger when their labels were bought out by Sony Music Entertainment. Jive Records thereupon remained a unit wholly owned by Sony Music up until the label’s dissolution in 2011, when Jive alongside other former BMG-owned labels such as J, LaFace, and Arista (before its revival in 2018) was absorbed into RCA Records (also formerly owned by BMG). The label was revived in 2026 by RCA as an independent entity within the Sony Music umbrella. Mike Weiss and David Melhado were appointed as co-presidents of the newly revived label.