Music Trade Review

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THE MUSIC TRADE REVIEW, FEBRUARY, 1U0
present knowledge that the boy can master
the instrument?"
"I naturally have said, "Yes, you are taking
the chance, but of course, you realize also that
when you first had this boy, there is where you
took the big chance on everything."
"We are now able to say, and have been
for some years, "You don't take the chance.
We take the chance. We find out for you
through our school whether your boy has what
it takes to master this instrument."
"There has been on the part of the inde-
pendent teachers—and they are independent
or they would be on our staff, for we gave
every teacher in our town the opportunity to
say whether he or she would accept teacher-
hood. Of course, we couldn't get the best
teachers. Their time was filled, and we had
to ask the teachers to share with us in the
expense of this experiment. We have a daily
broadcast that we have been carrying on for
ten years, used largely in connection with our
school. We hold out the inducement to the "
boy or girl, and it is a real lure, that as soon
as he can give a creditable performance, he
will be allowed to broadcast.
"I was interested this morning in the talk
on advertising to see the development in broad-
costing, and so it is that we believe that our
show windows are our first best advertising
and our broadcasting is our second, and our
newspapers are third. I hope the newspaper
men won't necessarily quote me rather unfa-
vorably when I put them third. When you
broadcast, you are just talking to your pros-
pective customers, and you come to know them
when they say, "I was interested in what you
said over the air about So-and-so."
In addition to the publicity that has been
proved, I very strongly approve of broadcast-
ing over our local station. I believe that the
real music store today has ceased to be just
a music store. It has become an institution
of music. We have necessarily in that way
come to create the demand, and there is no
greater way of creating the demand than
through the children.
"I heard my father say, who sold sewing
machines way back in the old days, that if he
could get into a home that had a baby, and
especially the first baby, he would proceed
to sell to the father and mother the baby. I
mean by that, in all the realm of babyhood,
none compared with that child, and so, having
sold the father and mother on the baby, they
had such confidence in him that what he might
have to say relative to the sewing machine they
took as gospel truth!
"It is fascinating to talk to these fellow
purveyors of that great art. In this world
there is no greater art than purveyance of
music."
Mr. Frank Kimmel, Manager of the
Piano Department of May & Co., Cleve-
land, Ohio, was then called on and gave
his ideas of the music teacher in the
following manner:
"I question sometimes what is a music
teacher. Professional men are all licensed be-
fore they hang out their shingles—doctors,
lawyers, and so forth. At the present time in
the State of Ohio there is a movement afoot.
There has been quite a strong music teacher
association formed out there whereby they are
trying to put a bill through our local house,
signed by the Governor, to license music teach-
ers. They have not yet been able to agree
upon an original standard of examination; I
don't believe they ever will, but I am just
wondering if that wouldn't be a very good
thing, if that did come about, because today,
we in the industry are constantly confronted
with any eighteen-year-old or sixteen-year-old
young lady who has had enough lessons to
play Humoresque rather nicely and starts tak-
ing pupils herself and calls herself a music
teacher.
"She learns through keeping her ears open
that some little girl's mother is going to get
a new piano and in she pops to all of the
downtown stores registering the name, which,
of course, goes back again to the original com-
mission evil.
Teachers Commission an Evil
"If you will remember, during the NRA,
when the code of retailing was formed, the
United States government and the business-
men who had cooperated with them, seemed to
feel that the payment of any fee to an outside
individual without the knowledge of the pur-
chaser of an article which in a sense was a
form of graft or bribery, was illegal, and we
in our store interpreted it to mean that teach-
ers could not receive commissions on the sale
of a piano. And during that time when the
NRA was in effect, we paid no music teachers'
commissions, and I do not believe that it made
our business suffer very much. I do know a
few deals were lost to competitors who did
continue to pay commissions, but I agree with
the previous speaker, that I think the com-
mission evil is an evil and should be discon-
tinued, which would result in that music mer-
chant getting the most from his local music
teachers who gave them the most in coopera-
tion.
After this enlightening comment, C.
D. Bond of the Weaver Piano Co., York,
Pa., rose and told how his company dealt
with music teachers:
Weaver's Plan Explained
"To make it short, fellows, we pay no money
commissions to any music teacher. We pay
beautiful commissions and get away with it in
good shape. We have a real plan of teaching
the children, and we do the preliminary teach-
ing in our store in order to sell pianos. We are
very frank about that. Then we turn the
pupils over to the teacher if the teacher is a
modern one, and we have a list of modern
teachers.
"We believe that the way to teach is to play
the piano and then if they get along, let them
go ahead and become an artist. It is the same
thing as the public schools are doing.
"We have a retail store in York which we
use as a laboratory and we try not to give
anything to the dealers that isn't workab'e.
It took us about six years to work up our plan
which is called the 'look and play' plan. We
get the children in and teach them the 'look
and play' method, which was developed by
the manufacturers, and we guarantee that any
normal child will play the piano after a
thirty-minute lesson. That sounds pretty easy,
and it is easy.
"No child is a moron. Every child can learn
to play because music is more natural than
speech. A baby will sing before it will speak.
We can take a test with all confidence that
they are going to buy a piano. After six or
eight lessons we hold a little recital. They
only play chords. Then we start to sell pianos.
If we can sell before, we do it. During the de-
pression, 80 per cent of our sales in Newark
were made through the 'look and play' method.
As business got better, we could drop some of
them.
"Now the teacher angle: We gave them a
dinner, which is a nice way to get at them.
Everybody enjoys a good dinner. Then we
told them very frankly we were through pay-
ing commissions in money. 'The best way of
selling your services is by means of samples,'
we told them. If they could give out samples
of pianos, it would be the best way. If you
don't believe that, just ask Wrigley, or Ivory
Soap. The teachers have ethics and they don't
advertise, and there are a lot of things they
don't do. They usually get their pupils through
their former pupils. The way to get the busi-
ness is to give samples, so we said to the
teachers, 'You give some samples/
"We got a few teachers to agree and we
got the best teacher in our town to agree to
IB
do that, and then the rest flocked in. We sell
the piano and after we have it sold we give a
list of teachers to the customer and tell him
to select a teacher. They can have a choice of
a fifty-cent, one-dollar, or one-dollar-and-fifty-
cent teacher. Then that teacher gives the child
six lessons for nothing. We don't tell them the
teacher gives them for nothing. We keep quiet
about that.
"Then, if that teacher is a good teacher and
can hold the child, the teacher has a pupil.
"We have the whole thing laid out in a
definite plan, and if you fellows would like to
have it, if you write to the Weaver Piano Com-
pany, we will send you a book that gives you
instructions on how to make the survey in
your town, how to find your prospects, how
to go about teaching—we don't charge for our
teaching—and then how to handle the teacher
afterward. I believe it is woth while. It is a
tremendous amount of detail that takes hard
work, and it is no fun, but if you do the hard
work you are going to get profit out of it."
This concluded the first half of the
afternoon session, and then Earl Rice,
Manager of the Piano Department of
Strawbridge & Clothier of Philadelphia,
took over. In this part of the meeting
he drew attention to the subjects in
hand and pointed out that to make a Suc-
cess honesty is a most necessary quali-
fication.
At the end of his introduction he
called on Ray Fagan, Manager of the
Piano Department of Sibley, Lindsay
and Curr, Rochester, whose speech was
on "How Shall the Salesman Demon-
strate the Piano?"
Don't Play Too Much
"I really believe that the bigger danger is in
playing too much, rather than too little, and
we consider that very many satisfactory sales-
men cannot play at all, that point becomes
very obvious. Of course, the playing salesman
has a tremendous advantage over the non-
playing salesman, but he seldom makes use of
it. He seldom plays the right music, and he
seldom works as hard, because it is so much
easier for him to sell pianos.
"I have worked in stores where the playing
salesman was forbidden to play, for the fear
that he might demonstrate his talents some
day on a piano that should be seen but not
heard. Care should be exercised in the selec-
tion of what you are going to play for the
customer. It is very important what you select,
but it is much more important how you play it,
as you will see in a little demonstration I will
try to give you later.
'Any piano can be made to sound badly.
Those of you who have had pianos out on ap-
proval and your competitor got in on it know
very well what I mean! Also the salesman that
can play like finding good arguments for sell-
ing should find the weak and fine points in
his piano, especially the small pianos, so that
he will not make a mistake. He should always
pay to demonstrate the piano, rather than his
talent.
"There is a little general test, very simple,
which I will show you in a few minutes, which
can be applied to most any piano, and I believe
all pianos will sound good under this little
test. To a point of rudeness, I never allow
anyone to play on a piano with a customer un-
til I have played on it. We consider that no
musician no music teacher, is qualified in any
way to judge a piano or to test a piano or to
tell you anything intelligently about it. You
can see the danger of letting such a person
come in and sit down at the piano and try it
for the benefit of the customer.
"One of the biggest teachers in one of the
biggest schools of America, the Eastman
School of Music, came into our store two weeks
ago, tried a very lovely Grand piano, and then
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