Music: Prepaid Packages

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Music may be an art, but the packaging and retailing of concert music is a $12,000,000-a-year business. Last week the biggest retailer, Community Concert Service, stuck a new pin in the map of its far-flung system. The pin indicated that Juneau, Alaska, like 350 other U.S. cities and 32 Canadian, had signed up.

It was partly the result of an accident. A bundle of Community Concert campaign literature, intended for a California representative, had somehow been forwarded to Juneau, and had so impressed the citizens that they placed an order. The experience of other purchasers indicated that Juneau would get its money's worth of music, selected and packaged according to standard specifications.

Variety Without Deficit. When Community Concert goes after a new city, it sends along a professional organizer who makes the rounds, meeting influential citizens, the Chamber of Commerce, the women's clubs and various religious organizations. If they like his sales talk, he holds a mass meeting, outlines a plan of financing, opens an office and stages a week's membership drive at $5 a head.

The resultant concert series usually satisfies the customer because: 1) Community Concert, with its vast supply of talent (some 105 singers, pianists, string quartets, ballet troupes, etc.), can offer a bigger variety of high quality attractions than the small independent manager;* 2) Community Concert's method of advance financing, with all the money in the till before the first concert is given, guarantees the community against any deficit. Member communities are given a wide choice of packages. Typical $10,000 package: Heifetz and Horowitz (at $3,000 each) plus three second-string artists.

Battle Greek to Bale Comeau. Spare, bespectacled President Ward French founded Community Concert Service 'in 1920. He was then peddling artists for Chicago's old Redpath Chautauqua booking agency, and he often found himself passing up cities because he was afraid to get off the train—for fear that last year's well-trimmed sponsors would run him out of town. To cure this painful condition, he decided on a new plan.

In collaboration with Dema Harshbarger, another Chicago manager, he tackled Battle Creek, Mich, as an experiment, raised money by advance subscriptions, sold Battle Creek a date for Pianist Harold Bauer. French & Co. went on from there. By 1930, their concert service was a success in so many music-hungry U.S. towns that it was organized as a part of Arthur Judson's mammoth Columbia Concerts, Inc. (originally a subsidiary of the Columbia Broadcasting System), which changed it from a small chain to music's equivalent of Sears Roebuck. Ever since then, independent artists have viewed Community Concert the same way a struggling hardware merchant views the big mailorder chains.

Although Ward French still has a soft spot for the little towns—his favorite is the isolated Canadian pulpwood community of Baie Comeau, to which he flies artists each year over the icebound Gulf of St. Lawrence—it took a war to stop him from organizing South Africa, and now he is getting ready for a Central American campaign.