Radio Concerts

Good Programs Get Scarcer-- Money the Root of the Evil

Not so long ago radio telephony was invented and developed with a marvelous rapidity. As if overnight, elaborate sets were on the market. Big Companies, like the General Electric, Westinghouse, Edison, American Telephone and Telegraph, broadcasted programs of music and other diversions, which might be listened to in fine reproduction by anyone owning a radio set. Thousands and thousands bought sets, and the great radio fad was under way. It increased to wonderful proportions. Today newspapers run special radio supplements, and throughout the country countless numbers of people " tune in" every evening, and pick up what diverting sounds they can through the air. The programs broadcast were at first very fine, especially in the way of music. The radio transmits tone with a great fidelity, and important singers and instrumentalists were glad to perform for the new wonder. Philosophers saw splendid things for music in this nightly projection of high refinements of the art into the innumerable radio-owning homes of non-concert-going people. But the radio programs have sadly deteriorated in quality. This has followed from the circumstance that the great radio companies find themselves confronted with a singular problem.

The President of one of these companies is reported as saying that a great fortune awaited anyone who would devise a means of levying toll for broadcasting service. This seems impossible. You send out into the spreading atmosphere a program of music and talk in the form of wireless waves. Anyone who has a radio set may listen to this program, without any charge or without the possibility of another's preventing him. The phonograph company sells you a machine and then sells you records. The radio company sells you a set and then gives you free broadcast service.

The companies have sold a vast number of machines. They are still selling them, but the time must inevitably come when they will have saturated the market for machines. They sell and will continue for a while to sell many sorts of extra parts. But, unless they work a miracle, they cannot go on inventing new devices of improvement forever, and they will saturate the market for parts. Automobile companies have an unfailing market for replacement parts. Phonograph records wear out, and have to be replaced at a fairly rapid and constant rate, and fashions in records change. But the radio machine is singularly constant. It does not wear out. Its parts are singularly constant, too. You have to replace bulbs, but a bulb will last for a year or more. Batteries wear out, but the radio companies have no monopoly on batteries. The companies are confronted by the fact that they have no prospect of a steady income of money from radios over a long period.

Broadcasting costs money. There are mechanical expenses to begin with. At first important musicians and verbal entertainers were willing to perform gratis for broadcasting, in consideration of the advertising. But soon, when nearly everybody had sung into the radio, the advertising value diminished. All that the radio companies could get were third-rate performers. They turned on the phonograph for the radio. That made the affair ridiculous. They have not done it so much lately. Protective organizations for musicians demanded pay for radio service. Orchestras still continue to allow the broadcasting of their concerts. At big sporting events spoken reports are broadcast. It is questionable how long these things will be allowed free of charge. The radio companies will more and more have to pay for entertainment to broadcast. This will increase their broadcasting expenses tremendously.

The radio companies have sold these numberless sets with the implication that broadcasting would be a permanent thing. Of what use is a listening-in machine, if there is little or nothing to listen in on?