Muzak was initially delivered via ETs and telephone lines from a franchise holder's ET.
To clarify, what is an "ET?"
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HD Radio’s History of Innovation and Future of Growth
- Thread starter rbc
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Metrosonix has several models of SCA tuners available. They may be allowed now that SCA is not so important anymore for commercial purposes.
ET was an Electrical Transcription, usually a high-fidelity 16" record that played at 33 1/3 speed. They were not available to the general public but were recorded for marketing to independent radio stations without a network affiliation so they could present the kind of musical selections - in all styles - heard on network stations. Eventually they became so popular on radio that even network stations leased them , later bought them for use. From the late 1920s through the 1960s though with the growth and availability of commercial LPs in the 1950s they were used much less. So in early Muzak you got the records to play at your location or if you were a franchise you got the recordings to play and transmit to your clients over telephone wire, occasionally electric wires.
It's an interesting sidebar that songs, not artists, were the bigger stars in the 30's and much of the 40's. Although there were some star bands and singers with those bands, it was not uncommon for many artists to record the same song... both bands and their singers.
Even well into the 60's we'd have some songs with more than one version released at the same time.
A lot of the "same song, different band" scene was due to the American Federation of Musicians and their requirement that stations have comparable live orchestra time, matching the recorded music hours. The live bands played the same songs.
And, of course, well into the 50's we had the TV "Hit Parade" show with cleverly named artists like Snooky Lanson singing the top songs of the week in their own versions. I remember having a powerful urge to vomit after watching that show try to do "At the Hop" and sounding like "Danny and the Amateurs".
Continuing the sidebar, this gets back to the AFM discussion we've had before. The musicians union was hell bent on keeping recorded music off of radio. So the only way for artists to be heard was to do live performances at radio stations, or host their own regular radio shows. The former is how the Grand Ole Opry and the WLS Barn Dance started. The latter is how Bing Crosby, Paul Whiteman, and the Carter Family became famous.
Songs were always covered for airplay, first by ASCAP, and then by BMI. The songwriters took care of business. The labels never organized or even built a system to get paid or to pay artists, as had been done in every other country in the free world. So radio was primarily a song vehicle, rather than an artist vehicle.
When Whiteman lost his lawsuit against WNEW radio, that sort of opened the door for more recordings to get airplay. It helped that the two biggest record labels also owned the two biggest radio networks. But by the 1940s, you started to hear more recordings on the radio.
Really, though, the AFM did not get national power over radio until when Petrillo "took over" and adopted a dictatorial, totalitarian management style which was comparable to what would later be called "guerilla warfare".
Radio converted music from and industry based on sheet music sales... where every bar and honkeytonk had a piano player if not a little band. The hits were just the songs, not the artists. This is why the rights business in the US was always based on composers and authors.
In fact, in much of the free world, until recent decades there has been limited or no rights payment to both artists and composers. In Ecuador in the 60's I paid no rights to either group; the only payments were made by record companies based on sales. I had similar experiences in the Dominican Republic, Perú and several other nations up to the 80's and it's still a more limited system than in Europe and the US / Canada.
Again, the transition from sheet music to recorded music did not adjust well or quickly insofar as getting fees from those playing recorded songs on the radio. Record companies first tried to keep the recordings off the radio and never quite figured out that radio helped them until Top 40 and Black music began to be huge in the 50's. Then, the system fell into place: radio makes songs sell... if you can, however you can, get radio to play them... and make your money off the vinyl.
Which continued to be the business model until consumers stopped buying physical product.
Well I would respectfully add to that. Certainly many singers were very popular and had enormous followings - Bing Crosby, Russ Columbo, Kate Smith and all. But the more intimate so-called "crooning style" was a function of electrical recording - not the kind of style that would been effective singing into a recording horn or through a megaphone live as they did in the late 20s. But in those days what you had were very active song publishers actively promoting their copyrights in many ways to receive as many performances as possible whether live or recorded or transcribed or live on radio. They had song pluggers going around making deals to get their firms songs played, special arrangements were made tailored to suit the styles of certain bands and singers, or stock arrangements for every combination of instruments known to man were issued for public consumption. The whole point was to sell as much sheet music as possible. Which is why when you love in , for instance, Billboard, they are very preoccupied with sheet music sales. Because that was the determining factor of the popularity of a song. Or course this changed to recorded performances but that progression was retarded due to the so-called Great Depression when people stopped buying records and listened to radio instead. But a good song was worth its weight in gold and when a good song, or any song or piece that stood a good chance of becoming popular, came along different artists and recording companies "covered it" - which meant simply had it covered in case it became popular hoping to cash in on its popularity. Most of the time a particular recording would become the most popular but often different versions by different artists and different companies became popular as well, because it was more based on regional and stylistic preferences. Which was true through most of the 50s. A good number would come out and different artists still recorded their versions for different companies, including ET companies, hoping to cash in. Because few artists wrote their own material - OK Russ Morgan wrote some of his and so on but most of the time what happened is a notable artist would be given part of the publishing by having his name put on it as composer or lyricist as payment for performing it or hoping for a performance. So songs were not always considered the "property" of just whoever had the hit record but they were "covered" for different recording companies and for the tastes of different audiences. In the 1940s most of the classic Tin Pan Alley song publishing firms were controlled by motion picture companies and they at times raised hell demanding more royalties and so on from performers and companies and radio. Very powerful entertainment concerns that wielded their power far and wide. I once wrote that Andre Kostelanetz never lowered himself to doing the song-pluggers bidding on his radio programs. Yet I have heard programs where he did just that! Because they got paid by the publishers or bowed to their influence to have the same song done a a few times on a program in different ways hoping to impress it on the listening public. Snooky Lanson and Russell Arms I thought most forgettable on TV but Giselle MacKenzie and Dorothy Collins were very fine vocalists. And remember Jill Corey?
Petrillo was sore because sound films put theater musicians out of work. Up until the late 20s all theaters needed musicians - from a piano player to a few pieces to 10 or 15 pieces in larger movie houses to symphonic-size orchestras in the big urban movie palaces. Once sound films came in they no long needed live musicians to play for the motion pictures so if they kept any musicians on it was to play for the live acts on the bill and as there became less and less popular there was no need for any musicians. Or the traveling bands appearing on the bill would be paid to furnish backgrounds for many of the acts. Russ Morgan's theater bands earlier on in his career would appear on the stage show in costume doing skits as well as supporting musically the other acts which needed it. So what to do about all the musicians sound films and recordings and ETs put out of work? And here certain branches of the AFM connected with Petrillo came up with all manner of outrageous suggestions which they were only able to put into place in communities where the AFM was still strong such as Hollywood where motion pictures were made and larger cities where there were Symphonic orchestras containing union musicians. Petrillo knew he was licked from the beginning but he had enough power to make demands and compel a few things but they were largely futile gestures. Radio stations had always played commercial records and they continued doing so. Adding ETs in the 30s. The high profile lawsuits of the 30s - Whiteman's, Waring's, and others, were to secure further artist and recording company royalties but they could not control use of their recordings, though some radio stations went along and wouldn't play their recording or when Warner's withdrew their catalogue went along with that or when ASCAP did late accommodated that and so on. But most stations kept on as they always had. Same with jukeboxes. I joined the AFM when I was 13 - my parents had to sign for me because I was under age, and I was a member of three locals which never did anything for me - the last vestiges in the 60s and 70s of an old and dated system. All they did was collect dues and in some theaters I played they sent representatives down to tell me how I should run things. When I was already paying my hired men more than union scale - much more. Oh I read on your site how the predecessor of the AFM - the Musicians Protective Association NYC would not play for Victor Herbert because they claimed when an employer did not pay the orchestra Herbert was responsible for making it up to them which he disputed. The union players wouldn't work for him for a couple of months at a time when he was one of the leading musical names in the country. If he had made it up to a couple of them he would have had to do it to the whole band or orchestra.
In Chicago where the union was relatively strong, some stations like I think WMAQ had an orchestra until the end of the 1960s. There was a live orchestra or the old John Doremus programs. I think in Detroit some stations had small orchestras into the 60s. Petrillo for a couple of years - '45 - '48 would not allow FM stations to duplicate the programming of their AM owners. He wanted them to hire separate bands. In Chicago his musicians were for a while not allowed to work in any establishment that bought wire music or FM music. He even made an edict that the radio station staffers who played the recordings had to be men in his union. This did not last long.
The Whiteman lawsuit is my favorite. He did an NBC show Saturday nights from a Long Island dance hall. Meanwhile WNEW did their "Make Believe Ballroom" show, and played Whiteman records. Whiteman was mad that he was competing against himself, but only getting paid for the NBC show. It went to the 2rd circuit court of appeals, where they ruled that since the radio station had purchased the records, that gave the license to play the recordings on the radio. Which is what led record labels to send free DJ copes to radio, thus retaining control. But the record labels were never able to get a royalty from radio.
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Yes but I there were always "stars" - whether of the stage, vaudeville, radio, recording, TV - on whom publishers sought to hang songs. One of the things that bothered Whiteman and Waring, Frank Crumit etc in the 1930s was that on radio they were in fact often competing with their own recordings as many stations would make up concurrent schedules to their live shows consisting of programs of their recorded work. But commercial recordings were always played even when the companies and acts tried to outlaw it. Because they had to fill their schedules and most smaller outlying stations had not access to many first-rate local acts. They corralled what musical artists they could and they leased, later bought, ETs, and played records they bought as well. The personality DJs mushroomed during the World War II on the fighting fronts as well as stateside and the more formal and elaborate network programming never really was as popular after that. Fighting men and women returned home and wanted more informal and intimate entertainment on radio. By the 1950s independent music, sports, and news stations were doing more and more business than the network stations. I remember the latter years of network radio and I remember hearing stations change from network programming to music and news. Or they might have kept their network affiliation for news broadcasts and specials. I'm sure you remember NBC's weekend Monitor which was on for 20 years and had all kinds of good stuff - but eventually that too faded away as far as popularity. As kids we didn't pay much attention to Monitor but we heard it. We were more interested in Peter Tripp or Alan Freed or Norm Prescott and Bob Clayton etc.
I think one reason Capitol Records, a new company, got over during and just after the war was because they were the first to supply DJ copies. Of course soon other record companies started doing the same.
My mother and father had radios which allowed them to listen to the local police department transmissions and the amateur bands and the communication between ships or ship-to-shore. After their deaths these radios fell to me and though they still worked there was little or nothing on those sidebands by then - 10, 15 years ago.
And I think that, while part is tradition, the night shows such as "Tonight" had live studio orchestras even though they did not do full songs because they "inherited" the custom of live music from radio.
Initially some of the artists that performed needed a studio orchestra. But as that waned in the rock era (can you imagine Doc Severinson playing for the Beatles?) the studio band was there for some music in and out of commercials and to do stingers for punch lines.
It also helped that one of the founders of Capitol was the songwriter Johnny Mercer, who understood the value of radio airplay.
And the bands, often, were licensed to Red, Blue or CBS and "couldn't" be played elsewhere. So stations bought transcription services to have music to play... no-name bands with popular songs.
And at some point, they discovered that rewarding the disk jockeys with something could and would encourage airplay and, thus, sales.
Payola!
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