February 10, 2012
Musicians Wage War Against Evil Robots
An advertising campaign from the American Federation of Musicians (September 2, 1930 Syracuse Herald)
After the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, all bets were off for live musicians who played in movie theaters. Thanks to synchronized sound, the use of live musicians was unnecessary — and perhaps a larger sin, old-fashioned. In 1930 the American Federation of Musicians formed a new organization called the Music Defense League and launched a scathing ad campaign to fight the advance of this terrible menace known as recorded sound.
The evil face of that campaign was the dastardly, maniacal robot. The Music Defense League spent over $500,000, running ads in newspapers throughout the United States and Canada. The ads pleaded with the public to demand humans play their music (be it in movie or stage theaters), rather than some cold, unseen machine. A typical ad read like this one from the September 2, 1930 Syracuse Herald in New York:
Tho’ the Robot can make no music of himself, he can and does arrest the efforts of those who can.
Manners mean nothing to this monstrous offspring of modern industrialism, as IT crowds Living Music out of the theatre spotlight.
Though “music has charms to soothe the savage beast, to soften rocks or bend a knotted oak,” it has no power to appease the Robot of Canned Music. Only the theatre-going public can do that.
Hence the swift growth of the Music Defense League, formed to demand Living Music in the theatre.
Every lover of music should join in this rescue of Art from debasement. Sign and mail the coupon.
The robot of recorded or “canned” music had many guises, all somehow destroying the best things in society. Here the robot makes a lunge in its attempt to steer “musical culture” away from a decidedly more pure course:
A robot at the helm from the March 9, 1931 Simpsons Leader Times (Kittanning, Pennsylvania)
Another ad claimed that musicians were being put out of work by Hollywood because recorded sound required just a few hundred musicians in recording studios. The ad even uses scare quotes around the word “music,” implying that recorded sound couldn’t even be considered as such:
300 musicians in Hollywood supply all the “music” offered in thousands of theatres. Can such a tiny reservoir of talent nurture artistic progress?
The robot putting musicians out of work (June 5, 1930 Bradford Era)
Joseph N. Weber, the president of the American Federation of Musicians, made it clear in the March, 1931 issue of Modern Mechanix magazine that the very soul of art was at stake in this battle against the machines:
The time is coming fast when the only living thing around a motion picture house will be the person who sells you your ticket. Everything else will be mechanical. Canned drama, canned music, canned vaudeville. We think the public will tire of mechanical music and will want the real thing. We are not against scientific development of any kind, but it must not come at the expense of art. We are not opposing industrial progress. We are not even opposing mechanical music except where it is used as a profiteering instrument for artistic debasement.
That debasement came in the form of the evil robot grinding up instruments in a meat grinder, like in this ad from the November 3, 1930 Syracuse Herald.
A robot grinding up musical instruments (November 3, 1930 Syracuse Herald)
The robot was even shown as a new nurse ineffectively soothing a baby, which represented the audience of the future.
The robot playing nurse to the audience of the future (September 15, 1930 Capital Times)
You best hide your daughters, because this ad from the August 24, 1931 Centralia Daily Chronicle in Centralia, Washington shows an “unwelcome suitor” who has been “wooing the muse for many dreary months without winning her favor.”
The robot attempting to woo your daughter (August 24, 1931 Centralia Daily Chronicle)
The robot was often shown as greedy in the ads, caring nothing of people but only of profit, like in this ad from the October 1, 1930 Portsmouth Herald (Portsmouth, New Hampshire).
A robot debasing music by simply playing for profit (October 1, 1930 Portsmouth Herald)
Fundamentally, the ads were an effort to make people believe what made music so special was the musician’s soul that was somehow only reflected in a live performance. This ad from the August 17, 1930 Oelwein Daily Register (Oewlwein, Iowa) got to the heart of it — robots have no soul.
The soulless robot as depicted in the August 17, 1930 Oelwein Daily Register (Oelwein, Iowa)
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Absolutely fascinating. Thanks.
The musicians had a good point. Live concerts are still a huge revenue. There is something important about humans experiencing something together. About contributing and receiving from each other. Why do people pay four grand to see the superbowl when they can watch it on TV for free? How few people followed the Mars landings? But how many more would have followed them if real astronauts were landing instead of robots? Who would arguee that many things have indeed changed negatively over the last few decades from road rage to random killings? I think that much of that negativitey could be due to less personal human interaction. The musicians caught a small hint of the problem early on.
Great example of a disruptive technology that wiped out a business and jobs. A good reminder that this is not a phenomenon confined to only the 21st century. Also a lesson that they spent $500,000 to fight what we now see as a natural and evident progression.
The protesters were right. The technology effectively concentrates wealth on few individuals disproportionally, and creates a very long tail of starving musicians.
The concentrated wealth, instead of being invested back into musicians, is instead used to pay all the extraneous jobs, e.g. promoters, CEOs, accountants, lawyers for fighting IPs, etc.
Great story! See CyberDawnFoundation.com. Our future is robotic, like it or not.
This is just like today. The music industry starts to lose money so they start to get all tight arse about the change instead of adapting. IE back then many musicians became unemployed or lost jobs etc because of the recording technology. Nowadays there is piracy causing musicians to ‘lose money’. Instead of adapting they get all tight arse refusing to adapt.
Great article. Such foresight. Now we do have multiplex cinemas that are operated by a handful of people (generally unskilled, lower paid). With the push for audiences to buy their tickets online there goes another job
i think this goes to show that the organized entertainment industry has always been helmed by dinosaurs trying to hold back inevitable progress. Whether you agree with technology making vast changes in the way we consume movies and music or not is moot; it happened then, it is happening now and it will continue to happen in the future.
What it also proves is that all the screaming about the death of those industries is also moot; when the dust settles, new ideas start to gel and movies and music continue to be made using the new technology, giving life to new ideas and pioneering the media into the future. Without change, we have stagnation.
It was already a bit late for them to start protesting, wasn’t it?
The visual part of the entertainment had already been taken away from live performers, why should the musicians think they were somehow special, or deserving of protection?
And of course we know now their silly little effort was completely futile, technology had moved past the live orchestra just as it had moved past the live actor. And of course how it has now moved past the big movie house entirely as we begin the struggle to dismantle copyrights and move back to entertainment by the people.
It’s interesting how the robots are radicalized as black men–they’re drake, and sometimes given then-stereotypical black features (especially in that first illustration). So these ads depict scary black robots attacking the pure white womanhood of “real, live” music. So basically these ads are using race-bating to persuade people of “canned” music’s evil….
Just like the poor buggy makers. No one should have ever been allowed to build automobiles. Those poor buggymakers! And what about the buggywhip craftsmen. Oh the humanity!
The cause behind the American Federation of Musicians bears a striking similarity to our project Opencurb (opencurb.com), which aims to promote artistic performance at the neighborhood STREET LEVEL using all available public spaces in the city.
We would love to gather comments from those who are interested in this issue.
As a professional musician today, I find that people are moving to want recordings so much more now. It is very sad. We just have to keep showing people that live music really is better.
Live music is fine, but unless you’re an elite you can’t listen to it very often. When radio emerged it made Opera and Classical music enormously popular, because people who previously had had no access to it could now listen to it much more easily. Maybe recorded music ruined many musicians careers, but it definitely democratized music appreciation.
well, now even the ticket kiosks are automated/unstaffed . . .
It’s a little silly. It was just recorded music. It wasn’t actually made by robots like it is now. Skrillex anyone?
They took urrr jeeerbs!
@Jason I didn’t know Skrillex was a robot!? I guess this explains a lot.
I think one of the major things, at work here, is that with multi-track and auto tune so readily available, that there is a lot of product out there which cannot, realistically, be reproduced live…
Schumpeter’s “Creative Destruction” at work.
“All your bass are belong to us”
I agree with the correspondent who pointed out about the familiar tang of dinosaur industries resorting to name calling when they realise their monopoly is being challenged by new technology. Home taping had the same stigma in the 80s as I recall. Same thing with TV and movies back in the 50s. Once they loosen their vice like grip on trying to maintain the status quo they realise that there are still jobs and money to be made in the new order but they have to get used to the idea they are no longer in control and work WITH their audience instead of trying to own them.
The irony : movies have replaced traditional theater as the most popular form of visual story-telling entertainment. Can’t we consider movie as a form of recorded theather, just like what they call “robot music” is just recorded music performed by humans ?
If theather actors had prevented the development of “robot theater” (ie movies), these movie-soundtrack musicians would never have got their jobs…
I think these ads are right! We should all write to Hollywood and demand that they return to live music in theaters. I’m sure they’d jump at the chance to employ more artists and help the economy. After all, they’re always going on about how many jobs they bring to the table, so they should be glad to provide even more.
In some respects, of course, they were right. Probably the worst thing that ever happened to music was the rise of the recording industry. But that makes it all the more ironic that it’s now the recording industry which is trying to fight against new technology which threatens to make them redundant.
I’m a visual artist. Back then most pictures were illustrations but the photograph replaced them putting many artist’s out of work. Should we make camera’s illegal (sorta like copying and file sharing)?
Who knows what P2P or cloud tech or home recording would have matured into and iwe may not ever know.
That must be a textbook symptom of technophobia. You should only be warning the public about robot tyrants if you are a) dangerously insane or b) John Connor. Of course, as we now know, synchronized sound massively expanded the film industry, which in turn created countless new opportunities for musicians—while at the same time, closely-related technology advancements were turning the recorded music industry into its own powerhouse. Today’s entertainment incumbents have reined it in a little, preferring somewhat-believable lies over utterly fantastic ones, and focusing more on issues of “theft” than a supposed decline in the quality of the experience. And yet there are still striking similarities between their message and the copy that appeared on those 1930s ads:
-Leigh Beadon
this is awesome :D
1930 American Federation Musicians…
[...] ng something together. About contributing and receiving from each other. Why do [...]…
The usual death thrashes of a dinosaur industry. Sure, recorded music mostly killed off musicians in theatres. OK, entirely for films. But that same technology ushered in the greater part of a century in which the revenues from recorded music went very high indeed.