The largest of the Big 4 (the others are Sony BMG Music Entertainment, EMI Group and Warner Music Group) with 25.5% of the global music market.

Its complex history and evolution is rooted in numerous mergers, acquisitions and ownership changes. Universal Music was originally the music company attached to film studio Universal Pictures. In 1962, it was purchased by MCA (Music Corporation of America) and over the next 3 decades was slowly transformed from a record label into the MCA Music Entertainment Group.

In 1995, Seagram Company Ltd. of Montreal, Quebec acquired an 80% interest in MCA from the Japanese manufacturer Matsushita Electric Industrial. The following year, Seagram renamed the MCA Music Entertainment Group as Universal.

In 1998, the cash-rich Seagram, headed by Edgar Bronfman Jr. (later of Warner Music Group), purchased the PolyGram Group and merged its operations into Universal. In 2000, French conglomerate Vivendi acquired UMG from Seagram and renamed the group Vivendi Universal Entertainment. Four year later, in an attempt to recover from over-expansion in the late 1990s, Vivendi divided their Entertainment Group, selling off 80% of their non-music Entertainment branch to GE (who formed NBC Universal) while keeping control of their subsidiary unit and reverting back to its former name, Universal Music Group.

UMG is currently comprised of 8 label group divisions as well as a host of unaffiliated stand-alone labels, including Deutsche Grammophon, A&M Records, Geffen Records, Interscope Records, Island Records, Motown Records, Tuff Gong Records, Blue Thumb Records, Impulse Records, Verve Records, Mercury Records, Philips Records and Polydor Records.