Chain-Store Music

Culture-conscious citizens of smaller U. S. cities hunger for high-class music. But few of them ever have a chance to tell a diva from a bettelhooper.* Ordering music a la carte, as music lovers in big cities do, takes expert picking & choosing. Because they want to be sure of the quality of their imported music, small-town U. S. music lovers have long bought it in packaged lots from large, nationally organized concert chains.

Today, 80% of U. S. small-town concert music is controlled by two large Manhattan organizations: Columbia Concerts Corp. and NBC Artists Service. The small-town business done by these two organizations (which do not compete, but divide the field between them) totals about $1,000,000 a year.

Mr. Big in high-brow music's biggest business is towering, barrel-chested Arthur Judson, president of Columbia Concerts Corp. He knows a sharp from a flat because he was once a violinist and small independent impresario. And he soon saw that it would be a bright idea to hook up concert music with radio's enormous publicity. In 1930 he merged with four of his competitors and sold Columbia Broadcasting System a half-interest in his new corporation. Today he is music's biggest wholesaler. In the music world he is quite generally regarded as the big bad wolf.

Last week Wholesaler Judson was summoned to Washington to testify before the Federal Communications Commission ' about the way he ran his business. For five hours, Judson squirmed and squinted through the cigar smoke and a rain of questions. When the air was clear again, spectators had learned that U. S. music was organized and run as unromantically as any chain store, or stockyard.

Like its only big competitor, NBC Artists Service, Judson's Columbia Concerts Corp. has a stooge set-up which tends to small-town business. This stooge is known as Community Concerts. Columbia Concerts Corp. sells some of its wares to radio chains and sponsors, symphony orchestras and local independent managers, but its biggest single customer is Community Concerts. Conveniently, Community now functions as an "inactive corporation," is regarded merely as a division of Columbia Concerts Corp., has the same board of directors as Columbia and the same president--Arthur Judson. When President Judson of Community engages the services of an artist managed by President Judson of Columbia, the artist pays President Judson's Columbia a 20% commission.

Selling Podunk. President Judson of Community has 20 traveling salesmen. They earn their pay mostly in towns of 15,000 to 500,000. In Podunk, for instance, which has never heard any music better than the high-school band, a salesman calls on the local bigwiggery and the clubwomen, cajoles them into a week's fund-raising campaign to put Podunk on the musical map. When Podunk's committee has the money in the bank, the salesman checks over Columbia's list of appropriately-priced artists. For these, Podunkians pay list prices. But Judson's artists get a good deal less. Community has not yet paid its way.*

Though the 376 towns of Manager Judson's chain usually take Community's cabbage along with its caviar, they actually get a larger quantity of big-time music than would otherwise come their way. The kicks against Columbia's system have come not from its customers but from its commodity: the artists themselves. Biggest bugaboo Columbia has today is Lawrence Tibbett's dress-collar union, American Guild of Musical Artists. A. G. M. A. has never liked Columbia's practices of giving its artists oral contracts, exploiting a few big names, never letting its artists know what prices they are fetching. Manager Judson keeps his own books, and keeps them to himself.

Employe Judson. To the few independent managers who can subsist on the crumbs that Columbia and NBC let fall, the wholesale chains are objects of mingled horror and envy. Columbia's president draws his share of that feeling. But Judson loses no sleep over what his less successful rivals think of him. Looking like a Daily Worker caricature of a capitalist, he sits behind an enormous French walnut desk in Manhattan's Steinway Building, continuously smoking big Havana cigars. Says he: "Managers are employes of artists. An artist is perfectly free to hire any manager he wants." But when A. G. M. A. representatives last month wanted to look at Employe Judson's books (on the theory that the employer has a right to know how the business is going), Employe Judson refused pointblank.

Employe Judson regards Lawrence Tibbett's A. G. M. A. as just so many howling Reds. "The American people won't stand for being told that a great artist cannot appear before them because he hasn't a union card." Asked whether a young, unknown artist with an independent manager has any chance against the competition of the big chains, Manager Judson replies: "If he's a good artist and has a good manager, God himself couldn't stop him."

* A member of an old-fashioned German street-band.

* The cost of getting Community Concerts into operation was $140,000. Judson regards this sum as a loan to Community's artist-clients, which they are gradually "repaying." Their "debt" still amounts to $94,000.

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