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THE: MUSIC TRADE: REVIEW
agents, but in many cases they are personal friends, and frequently
sentiment cuts a considerable figure, which it should not in business.
Business is a cold proposition—in fact, it is warfare; it is a hard
constant fight to the finish, and competitors do not show the slight-
est consideration of each other's feelings in the competitive battle.
All trade moves are disputed and opposed by those forces already
in possession of the field.
E
VERY business man must not only fight to live, but he must
conquer in the battle to succeed. It is this spirit of rivalry
that sharpens men's intellectual plans and spurs them on to higher
and greater things, and unless a man is possessed of this desire to
overcome, to surpass, to stand first in the land, he can never hope
to carry the day, and he will never succeed in the fight. There
are plenty of men in this industry who are liberal and generous in
their views of competition, and they are not at all sordid, or greedy
in their desire to accumulate wealth. They love success, not wholly
for the money which it brings them, because the love of gain can-
not always inspire them to their highest endeavors, but they love
to be called the leading men of the trade. They love the artistic
side. They love to fight out a competitive battle and win. Every
man likes to win at something; the love of victory is in every man's
heart, and the greatest gain in all the world is the gain of success.
M
EN'S ideas of success differ, but every man is striving to
achieve it in some form or other, but a man can't achieve it
in the piano business if he is running his enterprise at a loss; he
has got to meet conditions, meet them successfully, and whether
engaged in the manufacturing or retailing of instruments he must
figure on one thing, that prices must advance. Eor if prices
were right under the old era, how can they be right under the new
order of things? It is well enough to fight out this price battle,
and fight it out early in the year, because then things will simmer
down to their natural level and people will become accustomed to
the new order of things.
To meet a perplexing condition successfully is progress, and
progress is development, and development is the purpose of life.
When this great big country is producing 265,000 pianos annually,
and possibly 300,000 this year, there should be no question about
profit.
S
l'CH an industry as the piano business should show a profit.
It requires skill, capital and energy to make a piano, and when
the instrument is completed it is a kind of creation which has re-
quired the exercising of a good deal of skill, for when we count
everything which enters into it from the smallest screws and pins
to the larger elements there are upwards of nine thousand parts of
a piano, and there is no manufactured product sold—and we say
this without fear of contradiction—which has been offered to any
trade at the small margin of profit which pianomakers have asked
in the conduct of their business.
of instruments annually. If the enormous profit had been there,
why should we not reckon more wealthy men in the business to-
day? The facts are, when boiled down properly, that there are
some individual cases where pianos are sold at prices which repre-
sent abnormal profits to the dealers. In most of these cases the
pianos are sold entirely out of their class and the men who have
offered them have been deceiving the public. The action of these
men has encouraged the belief that there are big profits in piano
selling. It has been just this class of men, too, who have helped
along the idea in the public mind that they were not getting a
square deal from the piano merchants; that they were getting
skinned and badly and methodically at that.
T
HE class of men, referred to above, have been a serious injury
to the business, but we may truthfully state that in a majority
of cases, pianos have .been sold at prices which have not netted the
merchants the proper returns to which they were entitled.
The great evil of the retail business to-day is selling pianos
out of their class—in other words, asking an elongated price for a
cheap piano. Happily, however, the better element of the trade
has never been won over to this hold-up proposition, but unfortu-
nately the dealers have had to meet a kind of competition which has
been unhealthy, and they have sold instruments in many cases too
cheaply.
I
T should be easy to advance prices, for no man who desires to
purchase an instrument for cash, or who has the financial re-
sources which should permit him to obligate himself to buy one on
the deferred payment plan, would hesitate to pay five, ten, fifteen or
twenty-five dollars more for a piano, if he really desired it. So
this principle should be thoroughly fixed in the retailer's mind,
that the price advance should be moved along the line, and it should
be understood that the piano manufacturers are not handing out a
lemon to the retail trade when they ask a reasonable advance for
their instruments. They are simply handing out a good business
proposition, which it is well to inculcate in the minds of every
business man, and that is that a fair price must be asked for a worthy
object, if its quality is to be maintained.
B
USINESS is booming all over the country, and there are good
orders and good dollars to win, and it is useless for a man
to fool himself by simply doing business for the pleasure of
turning over dollars. He is only deceiving himself, and a man
who fools himself is apt to apply for membership ere long in
the down and out club. In this age of keen rivalry and mighty
struggle for commercial success, the highest order of business
ability is demanded, and it cannot be said that a man exhibits good
business judgment who runs his enterprise at a loss whether he is
selling pianos or threshing machines. It is up to every business
man to meet the changing price conditions.
HIS is about the season for crank legislation to put in an ap-
pearance in the various states. Many of the bills introduced
in state legislatures are nothing more than blackmailing schemes.
They are simply meant to alarm manufacturers and merchants
whose interests would be seriously injured should a proposed bill
become a law, and who would naturally at once form a fund to
defeat the proposed measure. The funds created naturally have to
be distributed around among ''influential" members.
The members of the New York music trade are particularly
interested in the repeal of the Lien Law. As it now stands upon
the statute books, it works out great injustice to vendors of pianos
and puts them to needless trouble and expense. Last year the New
York Association put up a good fight to have this obnoxious
measure stricken off the statute books, and it is proposed again to
make a stronger fight for its removal. With Governor Hughes, a
trained lawyer in the Gubernatorial chair, it is presumed that he
will thoroughly understand and appreciate many conditions which
are not apparent to the average individual.
L
T
I
T
OOK at the history of the industry; that tells the story. It is
useless to deny facts. How many millionaires has the piano
industry produced in the past twenty-five years ? Count them, on
your fingers, certainly, and not require nearly all of your fingers
at that. And still there are people who shake their hands and say,
pianomaking is a very profitable business. Profitable in a degree,
of course, but if the same energy which piano manufacturers have
displayed were placed in other channels, it would have netted them
infinitely larger incomes. Ambition and competition have made
the American piano the best in the world, and have made the output
of the European countries look like, shall we use the colloquialism
and say, thirty cents, compared with the American product.
Ambition is a great incentive to progress, and it is the desire
to excel, the eagerness to surpass old records and establish new
ones that fires the mind, quickens the pulse and plods the energy
to accomplish greater achievements.
T is very frequently said, too, that the selling of pianos carries
with it enormous profit. Another fallacy. Such a statement
shows a gross misconception of conditions as they exist in the retail
field. How many millionaires can be found among the retail piano
merchants of America? Not many, surely, and some of them have
been selling pianos for many years, and have disposed of thousands
HE sudden death of Ludwig Cavalli, which is recorded in
another part of this paper, removes from the ranks of the
living one of the old guard of the supply trade. Eighteen or twenty
years ago Karl Eink and Cavalli were about the two best-known
men outside of Otto Wesscll in the supply industry.