But labels probably agreed with their recording stars that jukeboxes were great for promoting records. In fact, they cut back on nearly all other forms of promotion for awhile, shipping the first-ever “free promo” records to jukebox operators. By the late 30s, a price war erupted between the majors vying for space in jukeboxes, lowering the price of records sold to their operators to as little as 20 cents each. Offsetting these slim profit margins was a resurgent market in classical music, which always sold in lower volumes but at much higher prices than pop records. Record companies also compensated by not paying royalties to artists on free promos or even on any records sold for jukebox use, sometimes cutting artist royalties by half. But while they told the artists all these units were booked as promotional items, they were telling Variety magazine, which compiled the American best-seller charts at the time, that these were sales. (These charts were important because jukebox operators used them when selecting their records.) This double accounting confused Variety to the point where they stopped publishing any charts for awhile in the mid-30s.
Further squeezing industry profits was the arrival of a new major label in 1934, Decca Records. Decca hit the scene marketing new records by big-name stars for just 35 cents, as opposed to the standard 50 cents. While the majors had long made cheaper records, they were usually on cheaper plastic and of equally cheap no-name performers or obscure old material. Decca sold quality records of such big stars as Bing Crosby and the Dorsey orchestras. RCA Victor and Columbia were much chagrined by this price drop, but it was just what the public needed to get excited about buying records again.
The lower prices, popular new swing music, improved recording and jukebox technology all reinforced each other and led to the fourth big boom of the record industry (with the first occurring at its real beginning in the 1890s, the second coming at the end of World War I, and the third occurring in the late 20s.) By 1938, annual record sales in the US had climbed back up to 40 million units, and reached 130 million by 1941. Although these were great times for the labels and their biggest stars, the average musician was in a different position. For many of them, radio, records and jukeboxes were taking a large dent out of their employment prospects, and they weren’t going to sit and do nothing about it anymore.

DJs, UNIONS AND RECORDING BANS

Musicians first saw radio as a new opportunity, with the main threat being the playing of records on radio. NBC and CBS voluntarily banned the playing of records in 1930, but the ban wasn’t rigidly enforced. Many smaller stations who couldn’t afford musicians still played records. In 1929, this practice drew the ire of the main US musicians’ union, the AFM, which managed to force any Chicago radio stations playing records to hire union musicians to spin them. (This practice lasted over ten years, but mainly just in Chicago.) At that time, DJs were very far from being considered glamorous: in fact, being paid just to turn over a record was considered to be about as dumb a job as you could get, and DJs were derisively called “pancake turners.” Once it became more normal for this “pancake turner” to actually select the songs and introduce them, they gained a bit more respect, with the term “record jockey” appearing in 1940 and “disc jockey” appearing in 1941.
The first well-known DJ was Martin Block, whose long-running radio show, The Make-Believe Ballroom, started in 1935. Another popular show of the time, Your Hit Parade, helped form commercial radio as we know it today. (The show also popularized the notion of songs officially becoming “hits” because of their appearance on less-than-objectively-constructed charts.) The more successful DJs were soon wooed by record companies (and in the early 50s, actually bribed by them.) The first of what might be considered “club DJs” (i.e. spinning records for a dancing crowd) appeared during WWII, essentially just soldiers tasked with playing records over a loudspeaker to a hall full of troops.
Capitol, a new label formed in 1941 with the intention of quickly becoming a major, originated the practice of giving free promo records to radio stations. At the time, the other majors were still hoping to win lawsuits forcing radio stations to pay them royalties each time their records were played, so they weren’t about to follow Capitol’s lead. (Their lawsuits were struck down on the basis that whoever bought a record owned it, and so could do anything they wanted with it.)
The smaller labels that had begun popping up again in the late 30s quickly began giving out their own freebies, gaining valuable promotion, especially from smaller stations with limited record-buying budgets. In this way, small labels and small radio stations found a way to help each other and ensure the survival of rural “race” or country music and the regional ethnic music that major labels were by then neglecting. The last majors only began giving away promos in 1948.
What became a larger threat was the use of RCA Victor’s new 16-inch, 33-1/3 RPM (which I’ll refer to from now on as just 33 RPM) radio transcription records, which allowed radio stations to record live broadcasts and repeat them later.

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