Word: columbia
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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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...
...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...
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...
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...
Gabriel Faure: Requiem (Chanteurs de Lyon and Trigintour Instrumental Lyonnais, E. Bourmauck, conducting, with Edouarde Commette, organist; Columbia: 10 sides). One of the profoundest works by a modern Frenchman. Beautifully performed...