Wired Music

Telephone companies have other uses for their wires besides letting you use them to keep in touch with your friends. They lease them to burglar alarm, news and stock-ticker companies. When a convention or concert is to be broadcast from a hall, it is often sent over a leased telephone wire to a radio studio, thence sent out over the air. Because it is easy to transmit music by wire, with a loudspeaker at the receiving end to amplify it, it occurred to Robert Miller, onetime engineer for Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., that such music might be saleable. With other engineers as associates and himself as president, he formed Wired Music in Manhattan, announced that he would sell music to hotels, clubs, private homes. Wires, leased by the mile, would hook up New York, Boston, Chicago, Buffalo and many another city. Subscribers would pay between $25 and $100 a month, receive programs from noon until three a. m.-- luncheon music, dinner music, dance music. There would be no static and, because Wired Music planned to hire its own artists, no interpolated advertising.

Well backed financially, Wired Music was ready to begin selling its services in Manhattan last week. But New York Telephone Co. refused to lease its wires, said it was too big an order. Wired Music, it claimed, "has possibilities of extending to many thousands" of circuits; the company's policy has been to rent out only a part of its spare facilities. Temporarily balked, Wired Music appealed to the New York State Public Service Commission. Decision was that since New York Telephone Co. already leases wires, whether "spare" or not, to 200 broadcasting studios, it must do the same for Wired Music, whose request is identical. The telephone company hastened to appeal.

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