Word: discs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...began with the phonograph. The machine which Edison invented in 1877 was an impractical toy which, as its needle scratched a cylinder of tin foil, made noises like a man strangling to death. The commercial "gramophones" which followed (colloquially called screech boxes) were not much better. But the early disc phonographs, which delivered both Caruso and Cohen on the Telephone, were too delightful to be resisted. The speed with which they became a national obsession was reflected by the financial statements of the Victor Talking Machine Co., which did $500 worth of business in 1901 and $12 million...
...royalties. For Petrillo had at least blasted a way toward discussion of the ownership of canned music. The antiquated U.S. copyright laws provide that only the copyright owner shall receive music royalties -ignoring the musician and recording firm, the artificers who put the music into salable form. If a disc jockey and a radio station collect revenue from the commercial use of the product, why not the men who made it? Petrillo was not the first to ask this question, but he was a man with a lever to pry out an answer...
Hymn to Soup. For months the record companies had stockpiled master platters like an Army cook turning out buckwheat cakes (TIME, Nov. 24). For a long while to come there would be enough new records around to choke any disc jockey. Estimates ran as high as three years for popular tunes. And almost all the great classical compositions are already filed away on master discs...
...song of the year. But the biggest record-seller was Francis Craig's tinkling Near You, which skyrocketed a dime-a-dozen record company (Bullet) into the big money. Top-selling bands on records: Vaughn Monroe and Ted Weems. Among girl singers, Jo Stafford, for her mock hillbilly disc of Timtayshun, rated twice as high in hit-tune sales as Dinah Shore. Perry Como was easily the top record-seller among the crooners. Most surprising fadeout of the year: Frank Sinatra, who wasn't even listed among Billboard's eight top male singers...
...Latest member of the disc jockey club was grizzled Duke Ellington, 48, who settled happily into an armchair at Manhattan's WMCA last week and contemplated his possible winnings (a reported ducal $75,000 a year, maybe more, if a hoped-for 150 stations buy his transcribed show). As a jockey, the Duke promised to be impressive: his jazz know-how gave his between-platter comments a fine mood indigo. One record, he decided, had a "pear ice cream" flavor; Songstress Sarah Vaughn was "serpentine and opalesque"; Crooner Vic Damone "caressed with satin and gave a back porch intimacy...