The record label Balkan was founded in New York by the Albanian Ajdin Asllan (Leskovik, Albania, 12/03/1895-USA ?) in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
Nikos Dionysopoulos writes the following about the record label Balkan and its founder (2016: 264-265): "As a musician playing various instruments (clarinet, oud, lute), his presence was constant from the late 1920s to the 1960s in mainly Greek and other music clubs in Manhattan, and participated in bands that played music from all around the Balkans. Balkan, with its symbolic/declarative name, recorded a number of important musicians and singers in a wide repertoire of Greek, Turkish, Armenian, Albanian and Sephardic songs. It is not clear whether the selection of the repertoire was conscious and structured, but it symbolically referred to the music of the multiethnic mosaic of the former Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. As a record label, Balkan became quite popular and was active until the appearance of LP’s, releasing both urban popular and folk music. Many of these recordings are unique recordings of a repertoire that would otherwise have been lost. Furthermore, it captures an aspect of the musical life of these specific immigrant groups in America [...] Of course, Balkan’s post-war discographical presence was complemented by 50 or 60 other small or medium-sized Greek and non-Greek record labels (e.g. Liberty, Standard, Nina, Aristophon, Alector, etc.) which form a discographical production corps (several songs from the region of Epirus are part of it) and remains to be explored. These record labels, together with the record labels Panhellenion, Greek Record Company, Pharos, etc., that were particularly important before the war, constitute typical examples of how immigrants set up independent record labels in order to release 'their' music in their communities."