निकोल रिकॉर्ड कंपनी — भारत सत्र

In 1904, Stephen Carl Porter, the recording engineer for Nicole Frères Ltd. (a London-based record manufacturing company), travelled to India and conducted recording sessions in Calcutta. The Nicole Record Company operated as a competitor to the Gramophone Company Ltd. in the early years of Indian recording. Over the course of 1904, approximately 700 recordings were made of Indian classical, semi-classical, and folk music, capturing performances by singers, instrumentalists, and musical ensembles. The recordings were issued on brown celluloid-coated cardboard discs in 1905, representing one of the earliest commercial catalogues of Indian music on record. Nicole Records made only a small fraction of the recordings that the Gramophone Company produced, but their contribution to the documentation of Indian musical traditions in the gramophone era was significant. The label is particularly important for having recorded artists and genres that the Gramophone Company either overlooked or recorded less frequently.

Nicole's brown celluloid-on-cardboard discs sounded thinner than shellac but cost far less — and would not shatter. Their 1904–05 Indian lists leaned on the same repertoire the Gramophone Company had proven: courtesan song, theatre numbers, devotional pieces.

Nicole Frères — a famous Geneva-London musical-box house — entered the disc trade in 1903 and reached India by 1904, recording on the cheap to undercut the Gramophone Company's near-monopoly. The venture lasted barely two years before the catalogue was sold on.

The Nicole sessions matter because they broke the Gramophone Company's monopoly over Indian recorded sound in its very first years. Competition pushed artist fees up, pulled more performers into the studios, and widened the documented repertoire — Nicole recorded voices, genres and regional material that the larger company passed over, which makes its surviving discs disproportionately precious to historians. The label's unusual brown celluloid-on-cardboard discs were cheaper and unbreakable compared with shellac, an early experiment in taking records to a wider Indian public. Though Nicole's Indian venture was short-lived and its catalogue a fraction of its rival's, it established a pattern that defined the industry's future: every era of Indian recording — through Beka, Odeon, Young India and beyond — would be shaped by challengers forcing the giant to record more of India than it otherwise would have.

The first real price war in Indian recorded music. Nicole's cheap unbreakable discs forced rivals to widen their lists and lower prices — a competition that put the gramophone within reach of middle-class Indian homes years sooner.