Word: musician
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...reassuring. He hinted strongly that he could reach a peaceful settlement in his present negotiations with the radio networks. FM? Television? He was "keeping an open mind on those questions." He made it plain that James Caesar Petrillo had a heart which beat for the public. He and his musicians were perfectly willing to make records for home phonographs; they refused only because 20% of the product was used by radio stations and jukeboxes without payment of royalties to the musician or the union...
...chandelier of a Sunday morning. His real enemies are the phonograph record and its cousins, the motion picture sound track and the radio station turntable. He is mortally afraid that without James Caesar Petrillo, all the music in the U.S. would eventually be produced by one non-union musician playing a musical comb into a microphone...
...Petrillo had already begun his war on canned music. Talking pictures had thrown 18,000 U.S. theater musicians out of work. Petrillo listened to radio broadcasts of recorded music as though he heard the rumble of doom. "Electric refrigerators put the iceman out of work," he screamed, "but the iceman didn't have to make them. The musician is being asked to destroy himself." In 1936, unabashed by the fact that he was simply the head of one local union, he announced that union musicians would no longer make records in Chicago. He also forced radio stations to hire...
This did not mean that the big-time musician resented Petrillo or particularly criticized his royal plan for dispensing 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...
...grudging reprieve. They would be permitted to make program transcriptions until Jan. 31, when their contracts with A.F.M. end. Petrillo and the broadcasters would start discussing new contracts next week in Manhattan. It was anybody's guess whether they would come to terms or whether every musician would be yanked...