THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN PIANO INDUSTRY
By William Braid White. The American Mercury, February 1933, pp. 210-213 (some selective quoting)
"During the last century the piano has obtained a position of almost complete dominance over the art of music. That is because it combines two properties that are not to be found in the same combination in any other instrument. On the one hand, its player can instantly and directly control the loudness of the tones he evokes, while on the other the keyboard which he manipulates gives him command over the entire range of sounds used in music, through seven octaves and a minor third, from the lowest A at 27.5 vibrations a second to the highest C at 4186. He commands every harmony within the scope of his ten fingers; and if he be sufficiently skilful he can even expand this scope by combining rapid skips over the keyboard with a judicious use of the pedal. Many musical instruments, in fact, nearly all, endow their players with the first of these powers. Some, like the organ, give him the second. But only the piano gives both, immediately and directly. Moreover, the piano is the easiest to play of all the more important instruments. It is this combination of powers within a comparatively small physical size that has brought it to the front of the musical art. But today that position is seriously threatened....
With some external refinements, cheap uprights soon began to appear also in the cities. With their appearance came the instalment system of purchase, already known to buyers of the cheaper lines of furniture. Considering that the retail price of a fairly good upright was in those days about 1250 and that $15 a week was a good salary for a clerical worker, it is easy to see how the instalment system became a necessity. Very quickly the cheap upright became the money maker of the industry. The number of manufacturers increased year by year, until at the end of the century some 300 were listed. Many of them were turning out what were unkindly called thump-boxes, that is to say, large, cheaply constructed uprights, poor in tone and poorer in mechanism. Why they were bought at all is still something of a mystery. For the American middle class was no more musical then than it is now, and the number of persons who could play the piano was proportionately no larger than it is today. Yet everybody wanted an upright, and 250,000 were sold each year from 1900 to 1910....
Cheap upright player-pianos soon came on the market, with the playing mechanisms built in. Within a few years after 1905 they were leading all other kinds of piano in output, and had become in their turn the big money makers. The apex of their popularity came during the war-time boom of 1916-19. Almost immediately thereafter this received, suddenly and unexpectedly, a fatal wound, by the emergence of public radio broadcasting. For twenty years, under the feet of thousands of wholly unmusical men, women and hildren, up and down the land, the player-piano had been emitting terrible caricatures of piano music. But there was no longer need for it when better music, in every style, could be had from a radio set.
The number of pianos made and sold annually in the United States has been declining steadily for six years, nor has the process yet been checked. The effect of this decline has been two-fold. In the first place, it has revealed clearly what has always been realized by a few, namely, that the American people were never really musical, but bought pianos during many years only because their possession was a sign of social respectability. The position which the instalment-bought piano once occupied in this respect has now been assumed by the automobile."