Grupo Record

The year 1953 is usually considered Grupo Record’s foundation date, after the Machado de Carvalho family – who owned a group of radio stations under the name Emissoras Unidas – acquired TV Record’s concession, based in São Paulo.

The TV channel’s leading shows were the musical shows hosted by famous Brazilian artists, besides projecting new artists with the Festival de Música Popular Brasileira (Brazilian Popular Music Festival). The group’s radios, like Rádio Record and later Rádio Jovem Pan, advertised the TV shows on one hand, and, on the other hand, had their audiences improved with the participation of TV artists. TV Record had the largest TV audience in Brazil when a series of fires destroyed their studio, their theaters and their antenna in Avenida Paulista.

Submerged in debt and losing audience, many of their artists migrated to the rival TV Globo and in 1972 the Machado de Carvalho family sold 50% of their shares to Sílvio Santos, future owner of SBT channel and of Rádio Record. The commercial transaction was publicly confirmed only years later because Sílvio Santos had a contract with Rede Globo forbidding him of taking part in the shareholding control of other communicatioon vehicles. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the station’s audience went up again thanks to auditorium shows like Raul Gil (currently at SBT) and Fausto Silva (currently at Rede Globo).

In 1989 the Machado de Carvalho family and Sílvio Santos sold both the Record TV channels and radio stations to Edir Macedo, bishop and founder of Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (IURD- Universal Church of the Kingdom of God), and his wife Ester Bezerra). Edir Macedo had founded IURD in 1977 and since the early 1980s rented programming time in radio stations and TV channels for his evangelical programs. In 1984 he acquired Rádio Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro, also for the purpose of broadcasting church programs. But after buying TV Record in 1989, he decided to maintain the channels commercial character, even broadcasting shows that contradict the group’s religious morals – for example, RecordTV currently broadcasts shows like A Fazenda and the R7 online portal covers special events such as Carnaval and has a blog specialized in beer.

IURD’s religious programming at RecordTV was restricted to the early morning and late night and Macedo structured other communication vehicles directly connected to IURD, besides continuing renting other channels and stations programming time. Since then Edir Macedo made Grupo Record one of the largest media groups in Brazil, based on an ambiguous relationship between the group’s medias and the church he leads.

The group’s strategy included the acquisition of existing vehicles rather than the creation of new ones. It was the case with RecordTV, Rádio Record and also Rede Mulher, which already had 101 affiliates when Macedo bought it in 1999. Macedo changed Rede Mulher into Rede Família and, in 2007, into the first all news channel on terrestrial open TV, RecordNews. Recenty, the group acquired the Rio Grande do Sul newspaper Correio do Povo, one of the oldest daily newspapers in the country, founded in 1895, and connected vehicles: Guaíba radio station and TV Record RS. He also acquired 49% of Banco Renner’s capital, based in Rio Grande do Sul.

With Grupo Globo as their main rival, Grupo Record also created the news portal R7, which, similar to Grupo Globo’s G1, makes partnership with local communication groups for the production of regional content, which has been ever more valued in recent years in Brazil.