1. The Boom and Bust of Early Movie Theatres Professional Musicians in the era of recorded music and visual arts

2. The divide between performers and composers The Copyright Act of 1909 created basic protections for composers under the complex concept of novel artistic creations. Federal statutory copyright protection applied to original works if They were published had a notice of copyright affixed. Lacking these features the publication came into the public domain. The law also established compulsory licensing providing that copyright owners may only exercise the exclusive rights granted to them under copyright law. It provided a fixed fee 2¢ for each mechanical reproduction of a copyrighted piece. The creation of the new copyright law led directly to the establishment of ASCAP in 1915, the American Society of Composers and Publishers. It did not include the rights of performers

3. How long was a copyright?

4. Rights of musicians Musicians had attempted through the late 19 th century to establish their own pay scale for similar work. However, in 1896 at the invitation of Samuel Gompers, the musicians’ union joined the American Federation of Labor and became the American Federation of Musicians. The strongest period of the AFM was the period of the first decades of the 20 th century. The Union was principally concerned with the wages and working environment of the musicians and not the residual payments of royalties upon their performance. But would become an increasing source of friction and lead to the 1942 strike by musicians name for James Petrillo and a ban on recording.

5. American Society of Composers and Publishers Protected the copyrighted musical compositions of its members, who were mostly writers and publishers associated with New York City's Tin Pan Alley; Irving Berlin, Otto Harbach, James Weldon Johnson, Jerome Kern and John Philip Sousa. In 1939 the National Broadcasting association created the Broadcast Music, Inc. that sought to protect the rights of composers and performers of blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, gospel, country, folk, Latin music that ASCAP refused to enroll.

6. Ralph Peer and the recording of rural musics Ralph Peer had worked for Columbia Records as an A&R man prior to his enlistment in the Navy during World War I. As he returned from service he followed his former boss to the newly formed Okeh record company and moved to Chicago to organize the recording business there. Although he was not the first individual to image having portable recording studios, he was one of the first to recognize the opportunities that lay in uninformed music communities. In 1927 Peer offered RCA Victor a brilliant deal. He would produce records “free of charge” and only take the composer royalties of the music in pay. To knowledgeable country musicians he offered, royalties, up to one-quarter of the 2¢ per record he was receiving as the holder of the composer credit.

7. The impact of the revolution to talking pictures In October 1928 Film Daily reported that one-third of the professional musicians in the United States were out of work. Studio orchestras continued to exist, but motion picture theatres became a leisure time waste-land for musicians. The irony of the public heightened awareness of music and the dismantling of the secure economic base for musicians would bring the recording studio, the motion picture industry and the radio industry into a collision course by the end of the 1930s.