Avex Group is the name of the Japanese company, which was established in Tokyo in 1988, by Max Matsuura. The company is very famous on the world entertainment stage, having subdivisions in music, communication, and entertainment segments. Avex Group was founded as a CD whole seller and grew into one of the giants in almost no time.
From a modest CD wholesaler into a huge international conglomerate, which managed most of the J-Pop stars, in ten years. Those are some impressive numbers from the Japanese Avex Group. The company followed the route of progressiveness and dedication, with high quality as the main value.
Founded in 1988 by producer Matsuura Masato, Avex grew to become a major player in the market after producer Komuro Tetsuya’s pop group TRF sold five million singles between 1994 and 1995.
Today, Avex Group Holdings Inc. is the largest independent record company in Japan. As recently as the first half of 2012, the company was Japan’s No. 1 music producer in terms of physical sales, surpassing Sony Music Entertainment, which was the leader in 2011. And in 2019, Avex recorded total music sales of $1.3 billion.
The name of the Avex company comes from the English phrase “Audio Visual Expert”. Speaking of visual identity, there were no trials and experiments, Avex has always stayed loyal to its stable yet bright and recognizable emblem, created at the very beginning of the company’s life.
The Avex logo, used by the company at the beginning of the new century, was composed of a two-leveled logotype in a fancy and sharp typeface, with both lines in the lowercase, but different sizes. The upper “Avex” was enlarged and had its sans-serif letters smooth and playful, while the smaller “Group” under it had square serifs and looked more confident and strict. As for the graphical part, the emblem, set on the right from the inscription, featured a solid blue cloud-like shape with an enlarged bold “A” in white, set in the lowercase of the same typeface, used in “Avex”.
The redesign of 2017 created a more modern visual identity for the Avex group, keeping the idea of the original color palette and shapes, but enhancing everything to a new level. The solid deep blue background now has a silver-white three-dimensional letter “A” in the lowercase, and a lightweight sans-serif “Avex” logotype, written under the “A” in a modern custom sans-serif typeface.