RECORDS and RADIO: THREATS and MENACES

Although Marconi technically invented radio (or “wireless telegraphy”) in 1901, radio as we know it was developed by David Sarnoff. Sarnoff was the young wireless-telegraph operator on duty when the Titanic sank in 1912, whose 70-hour shift that night earned him worldwide fame. He wrote an article shortly afterwards imagining that this “wireless world” could lead to appliances that would carry music into people’s homes. At the time, the airwaves were only commercially exploited for communications between ships and from ship-to-shore, with most people thinking that the fact that anyone could listen in on public airwaves made them useless in the home.
In 1920, Sarnoff’s celebrity status got him the top job at RCA, a new company set up by GE and other big corporations on the ashes of Marconi’s bankrupt “wireless telegraphy” business. RCA’s mandate was to explore (and exploit) the commercial potential of the airwaves. Within a couple of years, as more and more stations began broadcasting music, radios became fairly popular consumer items, but they only really took off when Sarnoff conceived of a national network made up of the best-liked shows aired on small stations around the country. (At this point, the whole idea of a national network was to sell more radios, not to revolutionize communications or even to sell advertising.)
Sarnoff’s ideas, combined with the huge capital his corporate backers put behind them, worked extremely well. In 1924, radios cost over $200 and were in a few thousand households; by 1927, some sold for just $35 and were in over 10 million households. (This boom may proportionately have been bigger and faster-growing than the late 90s surge of households connecting to the Internet.)
When radio began growing in 1921, early stations found that live musicians sounded much clearer over the air than record players did, so few if any played records. The record industry and musicians’ unions were still nervous enough to encourage US President Herbert Hoover to outlaw the playing of records on air, which he did in 1922. Hoover’s reasoning was that the public airwaves should be used for the public good, which included creating jobs for musicians.
However, the record industry still had serious fears that people would just sit at home listening to music for free without ever buying a record again. Concert promoters had similar fears: in Boston in 1924, a famous violinist sold 3000 tickets for a huge concert which a radio station later announced would be aired live. When ticketholders heard this, more than half asked for their money back. This incident may have been more indicative of a temporary “radio-mania” than anything else, i.e. an exaggerated conviction that radio would replace everything, kind of like how some people in the 90s believed that email would replace postal systems. Cooler heads understood that radio couldn’t replace the experience of a live concert, and that music listeners would always want the option of choosing what songs they listened to.
However, the electrical microphones and speakers used by the radio industry sounded much better than hand-cranked phonographs did, and after peaking in 1921 when 110 million records were sold, record sales declined each year until 1925. The situation forced Victor to unveil better-sounding “electrical process” records and electric record players you didn’t have to manually crank for each song. Soon, all the other labels also put out new “electrical” records, helping North American sales climb to 140 million by 1927, and global sales to 200 million records by 1929.
The whole time, musicians were less nervous about radio than record companies were, thinking that stations across the country would have to hire musicians if they were to broadcast live all day and evening. However, as national networks quickly coalesced, there was lots of work for musicians living in a dozen or so bigger US cities but not much radio work anywhere else.
Ultimately, this may have been the beginning of a musical class system that exists to this day: for musicians who toured extensively or already had a big enough name, radio could spur them on to superstar status. But for the vast majority of musicians and bands that weren’t in the top tier on the concert circuit, radio was less a door to superstardom than at most another union-scale gig backing up a big name. Although the big performing stars in both pop and classical fields previously had agents and managers and so on to help line up gigs and tours since the 1800s, it was radio that first got mass-market-minded producers and programmers involved in the aspirations and fortunes of musicians and bands.
The first artists appearing on the national radio networks in the late 20s unsurprisingly played very safe, recognizable songs on their shows, in styles that weren’t exactly cutting-edge. Many of these, like bandleader George Olsen, already had reputations on vaudeville stages where they learned how to please audiences of average people anywhere. It’s hard to say whether they thought of any long-term potential to radio or just saw it as a higher-paying gig, since the fledgling networks at the time (and the companies that made and sold radios) were looking for anything that could play to a mass-market. But any dream of radio being a permanent new gig for musicians was way off, though George Olsen was among many who translated brief radio success into a long career of steady live gigs. Although radio grew to employ over 1200 musicians in North America by 1935, that number began falling by the 50s and has been pretty much zero for decades now. In the 1950s, some pioneers of early radio looked back at the medium as having become a “cesspool” of crass commercialism by the late 20s.

COLLAPSE AND RECOVERY

The onset of the Great Depression combined with the ever-growing popularity of radios caused the near-total collapse of the record industry in the early 30s. Never before or since have sales ever dropped so precipitously, falling from over 100 million units in the US in 1929 to just 6 million in 1932. On top of this, the increased competition from independents as well as radio through the 1920s had forced most labels to lower the price of their pop records from $1.00 to 50 cents before the collapse began. It became so hard to turn a profit that by the mid-30s, nearly all the independent labels either disappeared or were bought by the remnants of the majors, with the majors themselves soon bought out by the radio companies (RCA bought Victor, CBS bought Columbia and semi-major Brunswick/ Vocalion, and Edison’s National Phonograph Company went bankrupt.)
When the industry collapsed, the first music style to go was the “race” market, limiting the blues to being recorded by folklorists if at all. Country music hung on for awhile, and in fact, many legendary country records came out in the early depression years. College students kept the market for dance bands alive for awhile as well. The expensive classical records, always maintained as much for a record company’s prestige as for profit, were pretty much phased out by 1934—even Victor’s famous Red Seal brand was put on hiatus. The historical cost in some cases was immense, as Paramount, Gennett and other labels sold the original metal master disks of many seminal blues and jazz recordings for scrap.
With their radios still selling in decent numbers, RCA Victor spent money on new technologies to revive the record division. In 1934, they released the Duo Jr., the first component record player (meaning you had to plug it into a radio speaker to hear it, presumably using an early version of RCA plugs.) RCA Victor sold the device at cost, hoping that more households with record players would result in more record sales. They also aimed it at young people, who accounted for 40% of all record sales
The music then exciting younger listeners was swing music. This “big band” style grew out of early 20s jazz, and no doubt evolved partly from young musicians—white and black—patiently learning to play it off of their jazz records. Several bandleaders (leading from 10 to over 20 musicians) were gaining popularity in clubs, on record, on radio, on the charts, and perhaps most importantly, in jukeboxes, which had become ubiquitous by the early 30s.
Jukeboxes had existed since the turn of the century, but only became more popular after 1927 with the arrival of machines that let the listener make a choice (from a selection of 20 records. Before that, machines played just one song or cycled through a dozen or so in order.) By 1930, 12 000 were in use; by 1935, 120 000 new jukeboxes were sold in the US alone, and their operators accounted for one-third of all record sales.
Some of the big stars saw jukeboxes as great for their careers, as kids played their records over and over in soda parlours after school. Club and restaurant owners were happy to save the expense of live musicians, and also made a cut from the money poured into jukeboxes. Less happy were average working musicians, whose union in the US estimated that over 8000 had lost jobs directly because of jukeboxes. The union’s president phrased it bluntly: “Records are multiplied and duplicated by the thousands and then sold to and used in places where otherwise musicians would be employed.”

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