Download The Boom and Bust of Early Movie Theatres

The Boom and Bust of Early Movie Theatres
Professional Musicians in the era of
recorded music and visual arts
The divide between performers and composers
The Copyright Act of 1909 created basic protections for composers
under the complex concept of novel artistic creations.
Federal statutory copyright protection applied to original works if
They were published had a notice of copyright affixed.
Lacking these features the publication came into the public domain.
The law also established compulsory licensing providing that
copyright owners may only exercise the exclusive rights granted to them
under copyright law.
It provided a fixed fee 2¢ for each mechanical reproduction of a
copyrighted piece.
The creation of the new copyright law led directly to the establishment of
ASCAP in 1915, the American Society of Composers and Publishers. It
did not include the rights of performers
How long was a copyright?
Rights of musicians
Musicians had attempted through the late 19th century to establish
their own pay scale for similar work. However, in 1896 at the
invitation of Samuel Gompers, the musicians’ union joined the
American Federation of Labor and became the American
Federation of Musicians.
The strongest period of the AFM was the period of the first
decades of the 20th century. The Union was principally concerned
with the wages and working environment of the musicians and not
the residual payments of royalties upon their performance. But
would become an increasing source of friction and lead to the 1942
strike by musicians name for James Petrillo and a ban on recording.
American Society of Composers and Publishers
Protected the copyrighted musical compositions of its members,
who were mostly writers and publishers associated with New York
City's Tin Pan Alley; Irving Berlin, Otto Harbach, James Weldon
Johnson, Jerome Kern and John Philip Sousa.
In 1939 the National Broadcasting association created the
Broadcast Music, Inc. that sought to protect the rights of
composers and performers of blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, gospel,
country, folk, Latin music that ASCAP refused to enroll.
Ralph Peer and the recording of rural musics
Ralph Peer had worked for Columbia Records as an A&R man
prior to his enlistment in the Navy during World War I.
As he returned from service he followed his former boss to the
newly formed Okeh record company and moved to Chicago to
organize the recording business there. Although he was not the first
individual to image having portable recording studios, he was one
of the first to recognize the opportunities that lay in uninformed
music communities.
In 1927 Peer offered RCA Victor a brilliant deal. He would produce
records “free of charge” and only take the composer royalties of
the music in pay. To knowledgeable country musicians he offered,
royalties, up to one-quarter of the 2¢ per record he was receiving as
the holder of the composer credit.
The impact of the revolution to talking pictures
In October 1928 Film Daily reported that one-third of the
professional musicians in the United States were out of work.
Studio orchestras continued to exist, but motion picture theatres
became a leisure time waste-land for musicians.
The irony of the public heightened awareness of music and the
dismantling of the secure economic base for musicians would bring
the recording studio, the motion picture industry and the radio
industry into a collision course by the end of the 1930s.