Music Trade Review -- © mbsi.org, arcade-museum.com -- digitized with support from namm.org
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VOL. LXXVI1I. No. 20 Published Every Satirday. Edward Lyman Bill, Inc., 383 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. May 17, 1924 ' slu *'«
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Interviewing Over 2,000 Music Merchants
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HE Field Editor of The Review, A. Frederick Carter, has just completed a full year of traveling
among- the retail music merchants of the country, meeting them in their own stores, studying their
problems and their activities, helping them on many occasions by offering suggestions based on prac-
tical experience and wide observance and in other ways rendering direct service to the trade as a
whole and to the readers of and advertisers in The Review particularly.
In the course of his travels Mr. Carter has covered intensively practically the entire territory east of
the Mississippi from Maine t,o Florida, together with Texas and other sections of the Southwest. Much of the
traveling has been done by automobile and the rest by train, and the small towns as well as the big cities
have been visited, with the result that the Field Editor has close to 10,000 miles of traveling to his credit,
and has interviewed personally over 2,000 retail music dealers.
This field work that has been, is being and will be carried on by The Review for the benefit of its
readers is revolutionary in character and marks a new forward step in trade publication service. It is a
distinct innovation in the music industry and the results realized from the outset have justified the publishers
in the belief that it is of a character that is fully appreciated by the trade as a whole.
These tours of Mr. Carter have enabled The Review to present in its editorial columns a thorough and
first-hand analysis of general and trade conditions in many sections of the country, not the general surveys as
offered by local commercial organizations but the results of personal investigation accomplished at a consider-
able cost both in time and money.
The work has, moreover, enabled The Review above all publications in the music trade industry to
present to the energetic and ambitious music merchant definite and successful plans for advertising, selling
and collecting, that have a recognized value because of the fact that their practicability has been assured by
actual experience. The Field Editor has been able personally to assist retailers in the rearrangement of
departments and windows and in handling many of th^ problems of business that have proven puzzling to
individuals more or less out of contact with what has been done in the same line in other sections.
This field work by the Editorial Department of The Review will be continued. In the meantime be-
ginning with the next issue Mr. Carter presents a general summary of his observations during his last tour
through the South and Southwest. These observations should prove of great and direct value to manufac-
turers and distributors who have and are about to arrange for connections in that section of the country and
desire to know of the actual conditions in order to guide their actions.
This first-hand survey of actual conditions in the South generally, following as it does detailed reports
of music trade activities in various sections, as presented in the columns of The Review by Mr. Carter during
the past several months, will be distinctly illuminating, for it indicates that there is a spirit of rejuvenation in that
section of the country calculated to have an important bearing upon its future from a commercial stand-
point, which means that the outlook for the growth of the retail music business throughout the South is
thoroughly bright.
This Southern tour alone required that the Field Editor travel some 4,000 miles under all sorts of
conditions and interview personally nearly 600 individual music merchants, with whom a personal contact has
been establshed which will mean much in the future to those who read The Review regularly and consistently.
Following as it does similar intensive tours of the New England states, the middle Atlantic section,
including New York State and Pennsylvania, and the Middle West including Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky,
there has thus brought to the office of The Review and to its readers a vast amount of detailed information
of distinct value gathered by a trained observer and not subject to the natural exaggerations often due to
local pride.