IN: Ronson was born at the Wellington Hospital, St John's Wood, London, to Jewish parents, Laurence Ronson, a real-estate speculator and music manager, and Ann Dexter. His ancestors emigrated from Austria, Russia, and Lithuania. Ronson was brought up in Masorti Judaism and had a Bar Mitzvah ceremony. The Ronson family had been one of Britain's wealthiest families in the 1980s; however, "the Ronson family lost $1 billion of its own money in the property crash of the early 1990's."

Mark made the leap from DJ to producer after Nikka Costa's manager heard one of his sets and introduced the musicians. Ronson produced Costa's song "Everybody Got Their Something," and Ronson soon signed a record contract with Elektra Records. He had already produced tracks for Hilfiger ads and, in 2001, used the connection to have Costa's single "Like a Feather" used in an advertisement.  Ronson's debut album, Here Comes the Fuzz, was released in 2003. Despite poor initial sales it was well received by critics. As well as writing the songs on the album, Ronson created the beats, played guitar, keyboards, and bass. The album featured performances from artists from diverse genres, including Mos Def, Jack White, Sean Paul, Nikka Costa, Nappy Roots and Rivers Cuomo. The best known song from the album, "Ooh Wee," samples "Sunny" by Boney M and features Nate Dogg, Ghostface Killah, Trife Da God, and Saigon. It was featured that year in the movie Honey and its soundtrack. The song was later used in the movies Hitch and Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Two weeks after releasing Here Comes the Fuzz, Elektra Records dropped him. Ronson has since produced multiple songs on the albums of singers Lamya, Macy Gray, Christina Aguilera, Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen, and Robbie Williams.  In 2004, Ronson formed his own record label, Allido Records, a subsidiary of Sony BMG's J Records, along with his longtime manager Rich Kleiman. The first artist he signed to Allido was rapper Saigon, who later left to sign with Just Blaze's Fort Knox Entertainment. He has signed Rhymefest, most well known for winning the Grammy for co-writing Kanye West's "Jesus Walks."

Were there any singles?

OUT: "Like a Feather"

input: Prior to the group's formation, Sakamoto had been experimenting with electronic music equipment at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, which he entered in 1970, including synthesizers such as the Buchla, Moog, and ARP. Hosono, following the break-up of his band Happy End in 1972, became involved in the recording of several early electronic rock records, including Yosui Inoue's folk pop rock album Kori no Sekai (1973) and Osamu Kitajima's progressive psychedelic rock album Benzaiten (1974), both of which utilized synthesizers, electric guitars, electric bass, and in the latter, electronic drums and rhythm machines. Also around the same time, the band's future "fourth member" Hideki Matsutake was the assistant for the internationally successful electronic musician Isao Tomita. Much of the methods and techniques developed by both Tomita and Matsutake during the early 1970s would later be employed by Yellow Magic Orchestra.  Sakamoto first worked with Hosono as a member of his live band in 1976, while Yukihiro Takahashi recruited Sakamoto to produce his debut solo recording in 1977 following the split of the Sadistic Mika Band. Hosono invited both to work on his exotica-flavoured album Paraiso, which included electronic songs produced using various electronic equipment. The band was named "Harry Hosono and the Yellow Magic Band" as a satire of Japan's obsession with black magic at the time, and in late 1977 they began recording Paraiso, which was released in 1978. The three worked together again for the 1978 album Pacific, which included an early version of the song "Cosmic Surfin". Hosono and Sakamoto also worked together alongside Hideki Matsutake in early 1978 for Hosono's experimental "electro-exotica" fusion album Cochin Moon, which fused electronic music with Indian music, including an early "synth raga" song "Hum Ghar Sajan". The same year, Sakamoto released his own solo album, The Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto, experimenting with a similar fusion between electronic music and traditional Japanese music in early 1978. Hosono also contributed to one of Sakamoto's songs, "Thousand Knives", in the album. Thousand Knives was also notable for its early use of the microprocessor-based Roland MC-8 Microcomposer music sequencer, with Matsutake as its music programmer for the album.  While Sakamoto was working on Thousand Knives, Hosono began formulating the idea of an instrumental disco band which could have the potential to reach success in non-Japanese-language territories, and invited Tasuo Hayashi of Tin Pan Alley and Hiroshi Sato of Uncle Buck as participants, but they declined. Hosono, Sakamoto and Takahashi eventually collaborated again to form the Yellow Magic Orchestra and they began recording their self-titled album at a Shibaura studio in July 1978. The band was initially conceived as a one-off studio project by Hosono, the other two members being recruited session musicians--the idea was to produce an album fusing orientalist exotica with modern electronics, as a subversion of Orientalism and exoticization.

Answer this question "when did they first form?"
output:
July 1978. The band was initially conceived as a one-off studio project by Hosono,