Arnold to the Music War

Beginning this week, God Bless America will be barred from the mikes of the networks, and swingsters will have to palpitate to something other than the St. Louis Blues. The sentimental will listen in vain for confections like The End of a Perfect Day, and Irish tenors will have to croon something besides Macushla and Mother Machree. For Protestants there will be no

Old Rugged Cross; for Catholics, no Rosary; for Jews, no Eili Eili. There will be no tunes by Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern. Rachmaninoff, Kreisler.

All these and 2,000,000 other compositions are the stock-in-trade of the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers. Instead broadcasters will offer selections from the 200,000 tunes corralled by Broadcast Music, Inc. since it was set up last year as a rival to ASCAP. Among those will be plenty of Latin-American ballads, many a song from the public domain (56 years is the copyright deadline), a handful of current favorites like Practice Makes Perfect, one of the very few hits uncovered to date by B. M. I.

Last week after ASCAP refused to sign a consent decree calling for the elimination of the self-perpetuating power of its board of directors, its blanket agreement by which it sells all its properties in block, its practice of pooling and dividing its income, the Department of Justice suddenly cut loose, decided to start criminal anti-trust proceedings not only against ASCAP, but against B. M. I., NBC, and CBS as well. Said Trust-Buster Thurman Arnold: "The Department is interested in seeing that neither ASCAP nor B. M. I. can get into a position that puts the public and the composers at their mercy. ASCAP has the strength and an organization already set up; but B. M. I. has greater potential danger because they wall have exclusive performance rights over the radio."

In no mood for compromise last week were Gene Buck and Neville Miller, presidents respectively of ASCAP and B. M. I. Firm was Mr. Miller that ASCAP would never get a percentage of the networks' gross for its music. Equally firm was Mr. Buck that ASCAP would not agree to a per-program arrangement dictated by B. M. I. Whatever happens B. M. I. will have to watch its step. One flourish on a horn of an ASCAP copyrighted tune may mean a minimum penalty of $250 for every station that broadcasts it.

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