Music Trade Review -- © mbsi.org, arcade-museum.com -- digitized with support from namm.org
THE
MUJIC TfyVDE
VOL LXXIV. No. 1
Published Every Saturday by Edward Lyman BUI, Inc., at 373 4th Aye., New York.
Opportunity
T
Jan. 7, 1922
M Cent*
Year
Responsibil
HE first week of the New Year is with us. We look forward with hope. We ask ourselves what will
befall us, what w r ill happen to business in general and to ourselves in particular. But predictions and
notions are alike only too numerous in the days which immediately follow the annual period of good
resolutions. What is far better is to ask what we may contribute of ourselves to that revival of
general activity toward which we all look forward and which we all expect to see in full blast during the com-
ing twelve months.
Glittering generalities are useless. No one wants them. Men are asking for facts, for exact knowl-
edge. They want to know what to do. They do not want to be put off with a lot of plausible but cloudy
language.
A year ago we were all talking wisely about "salesmanship." We were saying that 1921 would reward
fighters. We shouted "more pep," and supposed that we had actually accomplished something by that sort of
conversation. To-day we find that it was not "more pep" that was needed, but rather; new ideas.
Thanks to that extraordinary vitality it has, a vitality which springs from the fact that the call for music
in the hearts of the people is a call which never dies out, the music industries have survived the worst year they
have ever gone through. Have we of those industries learned wisdom?
If we have in any degree at all we have learned, then, not to put our trust in words. We have learned
that words are deceivers and strong oratory a mocker. We want facts. We want to know what to do during
1922, what to do to bring things back into shape.
One thing we can do is to abandon the notion that pianos can ever be sold in satisfactory quantities so
long as they have nothing to recommend them save the lowness of the price and the surprising elasticity of
the terms on which they can be purchased. Theoretically, we are all agreed that we must "sell music" to the
people. Then, if we theoretically believe all this, we had better begin to translate our theories into practice.
Nineteen Twenty-two will be a year in which words will be of little, and deeds of much, account.
But it is useless to talk about campaigns for bringing music into the homes of the people if we have
nothing musically satisfactory to give them. We need a great many much better pianos, and we need to use
all the weapons which inventive ingenuity has placed in our hands. We have the reproducing piano, by the
grace of the genius of a few men and the financial faith of a few more; but how many of us realize what it
is that we have?
We need better pianos, then, and still more, a better belief in our own industry, in its worth and in its
decency, in its value to society and in its bigness.
We need, also, appreciation of the true strength of the great mercantile weapons which have been placed
in our hands by the inventive genius of our technicians. We need to encourage them, not to discourage and
ig-nore them.
And we can do all these things. We not merely need to do them, we actually can do them. We can
do them merely by taking the straight, honest, truthful view and sticking to it in our business conduct. Better
still, we can begin right now to revise our idea of salesmanship and to learn that co-operation between factory
and sales department will do more than any other single factor, probably, to put the piano industry back on its
feet permanently.
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Lastly, let us remember that co-operation between wholesale and retail is equally essential. Tf we are
members of an industry, each one of us owes duties to his neighbor. If we are a collection of Kilkenny cats,
that is another matter. Lack of co-operation between retail and wholesale branches of the industry came
near to breaking up the technical personnel of our manufacturing organizations this past year. Let us all
resolve not to risk again that crowning and fatal folly.