At the hour of writing, the battle is in our favor, but make no mistake about our opponents being clever and resourceful. Our position is preeminently fair, but that will not deter them from using any methods which they feel justifiable to offset our stand.

The circular winds up with an appeal to the recipient to apply for membership in the National Association of Broadcasters. It incloses a form of application for membership, in connection with which I wish to direct your attention to inquiries Nos. 8, 9 and 10, which are as follows:

8. Who is maker of set?

9. Have you a license from the A. T. & T. Co.?

10. Names and addresses of persons who should receive association confidential letters.

Now, what difference does it make to the National Association of Broadcasters whether an applicant for membership has a set licensed by the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. or not? What difference does it make to that organization who is the maker of the set? And if confidential communications of the nature that I read you this morning, and have been reading to you this afternoon, are to go to the men who control this agency of propaganda that reaches 27,000,000 people and there is to be no responsibility put upon them for the statements that they make over those stations, then I submit we are approaching a dangerous time.

On April 14 the broadcasters sought to do the thing that they charged us with doing. They charged us with trying to break up their organization. We hope that it never dissolves. So they try now to destroy the confidence of our members in our own organization; and, as I said to you this morning, in the 12 years of the society's history it has had but two resignations and those were the result of pressure brought to bear by the Broadcasters' Association.

To the members of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, under date of April 14 last, the National Association of Broadcasters write this letter:

In the words of Gene Buck, your esteemed president, "Let us take off the false whiskers."

The Dill-Vestal copyright bills now in committee, as supported by our organization, offer to pay a definite sum per number broadcast for the use of music, the copyrights of which are controlled by you.

E. C. Mills, chairman of your administrative committee, according to published statements in the New York press, does not understand our position and has unfairly represented some of the facts.

Upon the insistent demands of Congressman Sol Bloom at the hearings last week, W. E. Harkness, of station WEAF, as chairman of our committee on conference with your organization, gave the committee some suggested rates. Mr. Harkness specifically mentioned that these were only suggestions and might be found too low. He further stated that we would subscribe to any rate offered, even allowing your society to write the rates.

These rates had their origin in the conference held with your executives which developed that your society would agree to $1,000,000 in three years from broadcasters. We labored in conference with your representatives for three months working out this plan upon a three-year basis. Your administrative committee indicated that they were in favor of the plan. A few days later after the plan had been approved by your executives we were advised by Mr. Mills that they would only negotiate on a one-year basis.

We want to pay every copyright owner direct for the use of his music, and these bills provide for this. We want to pay liberally, to encourage so far as we can, all composers, for admittedly, music is the raw material of the broadcaster's program. We are on record repeatedly as in favor of giving the copyright owner sole control of his property. These bills allow him to hold his music against all

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broadcasting. We do believe, however, that if the copyright owner decides to broadcast his composition, all stations of similar size and power should have rights to use it on the same terms.

Mr. Mills states that under the suggested rates, a certain station would pay $2.70 per hour for music, while its hourly charge for time is $2,700.

Mr. Mills is wrong.

$2,700 per hour is the figure for using 14 leading stations at one time, each of which would be paying a separate license fee, making the hourly income of your society $37.80.

Thirty-seven dollars and eighty cents is the sum we are to get out of $2,700, and the earnings of $2,700 being made according to their own figures 90 per cent possible because of the thing we create, and our share is to be $37.80.

I would just as soon accept their figures as mine. My figures are, however, correct under the reading of the bill.

Even this may not be enough, and we include it in this letter only to show Mr. Mills's misrepresentation.

We resent this twisting of facts, and in our opinion it is simply a smoke screen. We can not understand how the members of your society can be opposed to these bills, when the members realize what they will bring to the copyright holders.

The "false whiskers" are on your administrative committee. Will you ask them to take off their disguise and name the rates which your society believes are fair?

Then there is an inclosure with that. I will not clutter the record with it. I would like to analyze briefly, because this all leads to the point I am going to make, the proposition made here that all stations of equal oscillator input, that is, of equal power, shall pay the same rate for music. Let us take, for example, a 500-watt station, because that is the power class in which most of the stations fall. The broadcasters propose that all stations operating at 500 watts shall pay the same identical rate. The American Society has never proposed that they shall all pay the same rate, but has always adjusted rates to the conditions governing in the operation of those stations. May I state for your information a few of the factors? A station of 500-watt power input in New York City serves within a radius of 100 miles a population exceeding 13,000,000 people. A station of the same power input operating in Salt Lake City serves within a radius of 100 miles, a population of less than half a million, or less than onetwenty-sixth of the number of people residing in the New York area. Question: Should the station in the metropolis pay the same rate for the use of this product as the station surrounded by a sparsely settled community? We think not.

Take another factor, that of wave length. The stations which secured their licenses early in the radio game were assigned a favored wave length, between three and four hundred meters, and the vast majority of the radio receiving sets are built to receive upon those wave lengths.

The more recently built stations have been licensed to operate upon much lower wave lengths, so low, in fact, that the vast majority of the sets in use are not adjustable to receive their broadcastsignals.

Now, take a station which secured its license in the early days and, therefore, has a favorable wave length, ergo, it will be received by every set within its radius and compare it with a more recently licensed station having a lower wave length, and only relatively few sets adjustable to receive it, and therefore, its audience limited to those few and in some cases estimated as low as 10 per cent of

those owning sets. Is it reasonable that both of those stations should pay the same rate for the right to publicly perform copyright music? Or are we unfair when we give to the man whose audience can not possibly equal his competitor's, a more favorable rate?

There is another factor that we think deserves consideration. Some stations are operated by their owners solely and exclusively as a good will advertising proposition in behalf of the enterprise which assumes the burden of expense incident to the installation and maintenance of the broadcasting station. Such stations sell no advertising time, receive no revenue whatever, and devote their programs entirely to activities in their own behalf. Other stations are in business solely to sell the time of their stations to advertisers who desire the use of their facilities for the purpose of advertising. Now, as between those two stations, the profit of the one being in the intangible form of advertising and good will, and of the others in the direct and tangible form of revenue from the sale of service, should there not be some adjustment in those circumstances to the conditions thus disclosed?

Two stations of those two different types having the same power input would under the proposal of the Broadcasters' Association be assessed the same rate.

The variables of this thing are such that neither you gentlemen nor any other set of gentlemen-nor the broadcasters themselves, and I think they will admit it-are in a position to-day to lay down one definite invariable rule.

For example, there is a station of 500-watt power input operated at Shenandoah, Iowa, by a man named Henry Fields. He has a little seed business and sells seed to farmers. The talent that furnishes his program is local and most of his program is played on an organ by a girl who all day long is packing seed in his seed house and shipping it out to consumers. He has a 500-watt station but he has a local program. He is interested solely in the agricultural clientele. It might interest you to know that he broadcasts between 4 and 5 o'clock in the morning a program for the milkers, the men in the barns milking the cows. This girl comes out in the morning and plays on the organ and sings old country songs over this station. Most people would think that the only place where a program would be of use at that time in the morning would be the roaring forties where sun dodgers live and have their being when the shadows of night have fallen. Should we charge this station the same as one in New York?

Are you going to fix a maximum price? Are you going to say that we can not charge more than so much, and at the same time place no limit on what they may charge? Are you going to force us willy-nilly to make our works available to their use, no matter if they destroy our revenue from other sources, and at the same time permit them to afford to one the use of the facilities of their stations, deny the use of those facilities to another?

and

Are you going to establish here the dangerous principle of class legislation? And this is class legislation pure and simple, in favor of one particular industry. And are you going to single us out to punish and them to benefit under this bill? That is what this bill

would do. If you compel us to sell to all of them at fixed and uniform prices, why not compel them to do the same to their customers?

That would be but fair. But the whole proposal is wrong, and repugnant to the principles and policies of the Government. And it is not going to be done, and I have no fear that it is going to be done.

Now, what I was going to lead up to in all this was this thoughtand that will cover this particular point. With this grandiloquent gesture they hand us this check, signed in blank, on the Bank of Bunk. They say in their letters they have no objection to paying fairly, paying liberally.

It must be apparent to you gentlemen what the logical development of the control of broadcasting will be, as has been the case in that other field of endeavor, the electrical field, and that is consolidation. Obviously the station in the big city, with the favored wave length, can afford to pay a much higher rate than the small station in the sparsely settled section.

I ask you then to consider what will be the logical development if you do not take what seems to me to be the real indicated action in regard to this whole aspect of broadcasting. It is possible now for one master station, as WEAF, with the land-lines under control exclusively of its parent body, to hook up with a broadcasting station in every metropolis, and by that means to make available to the population surrounding that each such station a program originating at New York City and broadcast simultaneously to all the stations in the hook-up.

Now, the local broadcaster can not compete with that station. And why? Because the program material is not available for him. The "roaring forties" constitute the place of abode of the vast majority of the better theatrical and musical and other entertainment talent in this country. All of that talent is accessible for program purposes to any station located in New York City, and particularly to the station which can afford to pay the most for it. Thus, by broadcasting a program which originates at WEAF, and is simultaneously furnished to a large number of stations in a hookup by land lines, the program material not being available to competing stations, is but one link in the chain being forged to the end that makes it impossible for the little fellow, or the so-called independent, to offer an equal program from his station.

I pointed out to you this morning that on the one hand there stretches across this country a string of superpowered stations owned by one group of these electrical interests; and I pointed out to you on the other hand the practical possibility of the extension of this last mentioned chain, which is being constantly extended, receiving service from the central master station in New York City. Now, between those two mill-stones the independent is inevitably to be ground out of the picture. I am not saying that it will be a bad thing; and I am not urging that it will be a good thing. But I am pointing out to you that when that happens and there in the hands then of these people of the metropolis, there will lie such a power of propaganda uncrubed as has never been conceived, the power to make and unmake, the power to build and destroy, individuals or groups. And when the horrendous picture of the monopoly exer

cised by these 536 song writers is painted, I would like for you to have that picture in your mind.

The so-called Dill bill which, if I cared to take your time, I would show, in the sequence of statements made and distributed by the Broadcasters Association, is really the preparation of themselves, notwithstanding Senator Dill's statement that he has no pride in its authorship, and that he did not intend that it should throw into the public domain for the use of broadcasters all works broadcasted prior to the effective date of the bill, nevertheless does that very thing. It does the same thing to us again, following the precedent of what was done to us in 1909, just as the mechanical people did then, when they threw into the public domain for their use under that act all works which had been copyrighted prior to July 1, 1909.

Gentlemen, what an unfair thing that was to do to the composers. A man who wrote a song, no matter how great it might have been, and no matter to what enormous profit it might have been used by the manufacturer of records, if he wrote the song on June 30, or did not copyright it until July 1, he enjoyed no right to mechanical royalties from that song. It threw into the public domain for the use of manufacturers of records, thousands and thousands of then alive and vigorous and going works, and the works of men who were suffering under the competition of the phonograph record which was destroying the sale of their sheet music. They were illy organized then. They were not equipped to come down here and do a job for themselves. Do you mean to tell me that looking at this thing in the clear light of retrospection that you intend ever to repeat this injustice? We are asking Congress now, and had hearings over in the other House the other day, to give us back those rights of which we were wrongfully deprived, and to reinstate their copyrights as to mechanical reproduction for so long a period as may still remain of their unexpired protection.

You are not going to do that. There is not a chance in the world that you will do that, and single us out to furnish this music and entertainment for the welfare of the country, and furnish it through the broadcaster, who is disguised as a philanthropist and public servant, but who is no such thing, but who is as coldly mercenary and businesslike as the bank on the corner.

Now, just let us have a word about the horrendous committee, this triumvirate of men who are running this thing, Rosenthal, Hein, and Mills; and this board of directors that controls and directs the members and does not let them do as they want to, and classifies them and holds their loyalty only by threatening to deprive them, by reduced classification, of royalties that are their due. Let us get the whole picture. As I told you gentlemen this morning, it was organized to be a policeman. It was organized to apprehend thieves and pirates in the acts of their thievery and piracy. I do not refer to the broadcasters, but I state the facts. Not only piracy as such, but organized piracy. Organized was this society, to meet a situation brought about by the motion picture theater interests; the dance hall proprietors, and hotel men's associations, well financed, with able counsel under retainer, who were advising their individual clients to ignore our member's individual copyrights in the performance of their works, and to infringe at will, and their respective associations would defend any suits and save them harmless from any damages.