Gramophone is a magazine published monthly in London devoted to classical music, particularly to reviews of recordings. It was founded in 1923 by the Scottish author Compton Mackenzie. It was acquired by Haymarketin 1999. In 2013 the Mark Allen Group became the publisher. The magazine presents the Gramophone Awards each year to the classical recordings which it considers the finest in a variety of categories. On its website Gramophone claims to be: "The world's authority on classical music since 1923." This used to appear on the front cover of every issue; recent editions have changed the wording to "The world's best classical music reviews." Its circulation, including digital subscribers, was 24,380 in 2014.
Apart from the annual Gramophone Awards, each month features a dozen recordings as Gramophone Editor's Choice. Then, in the annual Christmas edition, there is a review of the year's recordings where each critic selects four or five recordings - these selections make up the Gramophone Critics' Choice. In April 2012, Gramophone launched its Hall of Fame, an annual listing of the men and women who have contributed to the classical records industry. The first 50 were revealed in the May 2012 issue and on Gramophone’s website, and each year will see another intake of honorees into the Hall of Fame.
Parody
The liner notes to Glenn Gould's 1968 recording of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony transcribed for solo piano by Liszt included "four imaginary reviews" of that record. One of these reviews, which purports to be from "the English magazine The Phonograph", includes this passage:
Unusual recordings of the Beethoven Fifth are, of course, no novelty to the British collector. One calls to mind that elegiac statement Sir Joshua committed to the gramophone in his last years as well as that splendidly spirited rendition transcribed under actual concert conditions by the Newcastle-on-Tyne Light Orchestra upon the occasion of the inadvertent air-alarm of 27 August 1939 The entire undertaking smacks of that incorrigible American pre-occupation with exuberant gesture and is quite lacking in those qualities of autumnal repose which a carefully judged interpretation of this work should offer.
Archive
In late 2012, Gramophone announced the launch of a new archive service. Subscribers to the digital edition are now able to read complete PDFs of every issue of the magazine dating back to its launch in 1923; previously readers only OCR text versions of archive magazine articles were provided.
