Asylum was founded in 1971 by David Geffen, who had previously worked as an agent at the William Morris agency, and operated as a folk/rock label. After Geffen failed to get a recording contract for Jackson Browne, his client at the time, Geffen founded Asylum specifically to sign him. Asylum's early releases were distributed by Atlantic Records. The same year, Asylum went on to sign John David Souther, Judee Sill, Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell and Glenn Frey (who Geffen encouraged to form The Eagles, with Don Henley, Bernie Leadon, and Randy Meisner.) The biggest coup for Asylum was signing Bob Dylan, who had been signed to Columbia Records but after a falling out with the company was shopping around for a new label. Dylan recorded two albums, Planet Waves and the live Before the Flood, for Asylum before returning to Columbia. Columbia reissued Dylan's two Asylum albums in 1981.
, Asylum merged with Elektra Records to become Elektra/Asylum Records. David Geffen remained in charge of the company until 1975, when he resigned as director and retired, due to a cancer scare. Among its subsequent signings was Warren Zevon, who released a series of stellar LPs for the label; his self-titled 1976 label debut has been called the best California rock album of the decade.
By the early 1980s—though technically still billed as "Elektra/Asylum Records or Elektra/Asylum/Nonesuch Records"—Elektra and Asylum began to split off with the former becoming more dominant and the latter acting as more of an extension. By the middle of the decade, the company was unofficially calling itself Elektra Records, and in 1989 it was renamed Elektra Entertainment. Asylum, meanwhile, broke off into a subsidiary label underneath and subsequently became less active in its own right.

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