ASCAP Returns

This week, after being barred from the networks since Jan. 1 when the big chains joined battle with the songwriters' society, ASCAP music returns to the air. Mutual Broadcasting System approved an agreement with the Society, and in a Garrison finish at St. Louis won ratification from a majority of its 169 member stations. By signing on the eve of the National Association of Broadcasters convention in the same city, at which the battle of music was to be a topic secondary only to the FCC antimonopoly report (TiME, May 12), Mutual and ASCAP did the big broadcasters one in the eye.

By the new agreement the Mutual chain will pay 3% of its gross receipts on a blanket license agreement for the first four years, 3 1/2% thereafter until January 1950. Payment on a pay-as-you-play basis was rejected by Mutual on grounds that the bookkeeping would be too complicated.

The new terms were a comedown for ASCAP, which before the music war collected at a blanket rate of 5% of gross from the stations, and was asking 7 1/2% from the chains to renew contracts. ASCAP General Manager John Paine reckoned that if extended to the entire industry the new terms would yield some $4,200,000 a year. ASCAP's 1940 revenue ran about $550,000 higher. The contract applies only to network programs. Local affiliates still must sign contracts with ASCAP if they want to use its music on non-network broadcasts.

Ratification of the agreement was a surprise the N.A.B. will long remember. Anxious to go to the N.A.B. convention in a strong strategical position, Mutual chieftains had called an extraordinary meeting of Mutual affiliates to consider the agreement before the convention's start. Even before Mutual's members had assembled on the swank Starlight Roof of St. Louis' Hotel Chase, President Neville Miller of N.A.B., which is dominated by NBC and CBS, had already wired them asking postponement till he could explain matters at the forthcoming convention.

Mutual's General Manager Fred Weber denounced this as an attempt to "coerce, influence or restrain the free choice of action" of Mutual's affiliates. Mutual President Wilbert E. Macfarlane pled lengthily for ratification, while ASCAP officials lurked hopefully near by. Neville Miller's pleas and the opposition of John Shepard III, bulky, argumentative president of New England's Yankee and Colonial networks whose stations pipe in many a big-chain program, deadlocked the voters.

It looked as though the Mutual-ASCAP squeeze--by which Mutual would have the advantage of immediate ASCAP music and ASCAP would have a bargaining stick over the rest of the broadcasters--was about to come unstuck. But on Sunday morning Fred Weber got busy on the phone. Sitting in his hotel room, devouring one steak sandwich after another, he began calling Pittsburgh, Texas, Utah, Minnesota. He found one man playing golf, reached another fishing, called another on a yacht, but failed to locate Fort Worth's Captain Elliott Roosevelt. Mail, wire and phone votes rolled in. By late Sunday the balance shifted, and 86 had agreed to ratify (one more than the required majority). Mutual stockholders met again, and Yankee's Shepard withdrew his opposition to make the vote unanimous. Proclaimed the victors smoothly: "The opposition was well organized but reached its peak early in the deliberations."

Said a proud MBS communique: "The Mutual Broadcasting System led the way in breaking the log jam of music for the benefit of the American people." Chortled a Mutualite: "N.A.B. has the St. Louis blues."

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