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REVIEW
THE
VOL. LXXX. No. 9
Published Every Saturday. Edward Lyman Bill, Inc., 383 Madison Ave., New York, N. Y., Feb. 28, 1925
Blni
g. ( g o g B e ;
10 Cents
Year
Is Your Music Roll Department Linked
With Your Player Department?'
Selling a Player-Piano Without at the Same Time Selling the Idea to the Customer of Steadily Buying
Music Rolls Is Selling Eventual Discontent, Complaints and Service Expense—An Answer to . „
k
Some of the Vital Questions in Merchandising the Player and the Music Roll
W
HAT is going to be said here was said
in another way a month ago in The Re-
view. It is here going to be said again
in a somewhat different way, but just as posi-
tively and just as strongly.
Have you got your music roll department tied
up with your player-piano sales work?
Does you store carry a regular department
for selling music rolls?
Do you constantly advertise in your commu-
nity the monthly roll publications, and do you
see that each owner of a player-piano whom
you can reach hears about your ability to give
good music-roll service?
Do you, furthermore, realize that to sell a
player-piano without at the same time selling
the idea of buying music steadily and con-
stantly is to sell discontent, complaints and
service troubles?
Do you know that a large, in fact a dis-
astrously large, percentage of service expenses
in player-piano profit and loss can be traced di-
rectly to the ignorance of owners as to the
musical capacities of the instrument (even when
it is a reproducer) and their not having been
sold on the steady purchase of new music?
Here are some pretty comprehensive ques-
tions. We pose them before the attention of
every m«sic merchant or salesman who has
player-pianos to sell of any type or make, and
who reads this article. We say to every such
reader: 'These questions are vital. They strike
at the very root of your business success.
What is your answer to them?
A Strange Anomaly
Frankly, it is almost certain that every single
man who might put these questions to himself
would admit that they are indeed vital, that
they do strike at the root of business success in
this industry and that the right answer to every
one of them is "Yes," with a capital Y. Yet
the fact of a thing's being perfectly obvious
does not seem to have anything at all to do
with its being considered practical; and so we
have the strange anomaly of a >tate of affairs
which everybody agrees is ridicllous being al-
lowed to dominate a great ret-ul industry, and
of the most obvious and natural remedies for it
being entirely neglected by p'obably the greater
number of men concerned.
There would not be mucn practical use in try-
ing to trace the underlying causes of these facts.
They have an historical basis which can be
found by anyone who cares to go back over the
outstanding facts in the development of the in-
dustry from its earliest days. For a long time,
however, they were disregarded, and it has been
only during the last year or so, since, in fact,
the great post-war readjustment period set in,
r
i
1
HE retail music merchant who fails to
perceive the close relation between the
sale of player-pianos and of music rolls
misses what is probably the greatest and
most vital factor in the proper merchan-
dising of these instruments.
Here are sev-
eral vital questions which every music mer-
chant should ask himself and find the an-
swers in the ivay he is conducting his music
roll sales. To neglect them is essentially to
neglect the sale of player-pianos, the instru-
ment which has the widest potential market
of any piano which is carried by him.—
EDITOR.
that thinking men throughout the trade have
come to see how desperately important it is to
put the merchandising of the player-piano upon
a scientific basis. Thus realizing, the best
minds in the trade likewise realize that the key-
position in the whole strategy is in the connec-
tion between the player-piano and the music-
roll.
The Problem Defined
In other words, the problem of successful
merchandising in the player business is primar-
ily and mainly the problem of tying up the
player-piano to the music roll in the retail store.
Some may prefer to say tying up the roll to the
player; but the idea is the same in either case.
Now, be it noted that there is nothing revo-
lutionary or even new in this statement at all.
It is merely a case of going back to the first
days of the industry. Then, with a completely
and absolutely novel proposition to put before
an unprepared public, the pioneers took the per-
fectly correct, because perfectly obvious, course
of treating the music-roll precisely as what it
was by its very nature, and always must be,
namely, as an integral part of the new instru-
ment. In those early days each maker of a
player instrument had perforce to make his own
music-rolls and, naturally, had to originate his
own selling plans and his own campaign strat-
egy. Of course, all such men stressed, above
everything else, the player's musical capacities
and talked about nothing else. A slogan very
famous in the first days of the player was "the
personal production of music" and another was
"the piano—plus the ability to play it." Of
course, under the sway of these correct princi-
ples, as so clearly set forth in the very advertis-
ing slogans used by pioneer houses, the selling
of the new instrument was wholly based upon
the selling of a new and wonderful gate to
music's delights, a gate open to all instead of to
only a few. And that was how, despite a hun-
dred difficulties, not the least of which was the
mechanical imperfection of the instruments
themselves, the player-piano won out.
"In Those Days"
In those days, as the present writer only too
well remembers, the music-roll department was
one of the most important in the business.
Those were the days of circulating libraries,
when the whole catalog of music was open to
each owner of a player-piano upon payment of
a small monthly or annual fee. In those days
the player-piano seemed at one time rapidly to
be becoming a fashionable fad, and that it did
not so become can only be attributed to the
fact that the trade preferred to try to force
sales through stressing the appeal to lower
quality and lower price. That is the truth and
there is no sense in trying to dodge it.
Well, to-day we have come the full round of
the circle, and we are back at the beginning
again. Sales have fallen off and we ^re told
that the public is no longer interested, or at
least enthusiastic. Yet the experience oMhose
houses which are handling the situation wisely,
and in accord with correct principle, shows that
this is not true. The fault is not with the
people but with the trade, which, to only too
large an extent, has been stupid enough to think
that player merchandising can be kept forever
split apart into two halves, and that a living
appeal can be made upon the sole basis of
prices, easy terms and throw-ins.
By this time, surely, the absurdity of such a
{Continued on page 5)