Chords for Phil Alvin on "Record Companies"

So, Phil, well, we're talking about, are you happy with the record industry these days?
_ _ Well_
_ _ _ I love _ _ _ _ music, and I play music, and I consider myself to be a part of music.
Now, record companies is just a way of trying to trick you, sort of scam you, into what
the facts are, is that these are furniture companies and they have nothing to do with
music except that they have been sucking the money out of music.
You're confusing people.
Furniture, they're not furniture companies.
Yes, they are.
They're commodity companies.
No, they are not.
No, no, no, no, no.
They are furniture companies.
That's how they started.
That's what their contracts are.
That's what they intended to sell, even into the 1950s. _
This is, he told me this is the Phil Alvin show, so I get to do my spiel. _ _ _ _
In 800 BC, Homer, the guy that did the Iliad and the Odyssey, made his money one way.
He sang and you paid him when he was there.
[A]
That's what all things were in 800 BC.
Homer also wrote it down [N] so he didn't have to sing it to the next kid like it had been
sung to him, and so they called him the great poet.
But he was just a singer making a good living, playing and getting paid where he was.
Now in _ _ _ 1878, Edison invented a record player.
It was on one side of a record, it was on a cylinder, and the thing went up and down.
And he had furniture companies that wanted to distribute the record player.
Furniture companies like the Victor Furniture Company. _
That's right, see Bart, we don't know this stuff.
We don't know the facts.
See, you know what he'd let you know?
We don't know the facts about a lot of things in our country.
We don't know a lot of facts.
No, these are furniture companies.
The Aeolian, Volkalian, Brunswick, the first blues record ever made was made by the OK
Furniture Company in New York City.
The Paramount Furniture Company in Grafton, Wisconsin.
These are furniture companies.
And they sold furniture and they were not interested in selling music or records.
They were interested in selling record players.
Sounds like Sony.
This is art.
_ _ Interhistory.
I just told you the reason Sony owns the record companies is because they make the furniture now.
That's the fact.
This is not a joke.
I'm not nuts, folks.
Well, it's not a joke, but.
I know, I'm _ always open to that.
I may be nuts, but I ain't lying.
Alright?
That's true.
Tell her like it is.
Tell her like it is.
Tell her like it is. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.
And this is your music.
Now the music.
OK, so _ _ record companies.
_ Edison was a poor businessman.
It was charging [G] people very high prices for [A#] distribution.
_ Victor [N] Furniture Company didn't want to pay Edison 60% for distribution.
I don't remember the exact number.
It was very high in comparison.
So everybody was trying to design their own patentable record process.
Victor did it.
_ Rather than encode things up and down on the cylinder called Hill and Dale recording that
Edison did, Victor said, well, we'll record things left and right.
And they patented that process.
And the Victor Furniture Company, ladies [A] and gentlemen, Furniture Company was very happy
that it had this patentable process because they wanted [N] to sell Victrolas, the Victor
piece of furniture.
And they said, anybody in the world can use our patentable process for free because we
want people to make records.
We're not in the [D] music business.
We sell [C#] furniture.
We got trucks and we got warehouses for furniture.
But Phil, Warner [N] Brothers Records doesn't sell furniture.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
We'll get to Warner Brothers Records.
Uh oh.
We only got to have five.
It'll go fast.
Where's the 1978 right?
No, no, no.
But you have to get these two things that happened.
Victor came into the furniture business.
Victor in the furniture business [A] encoded the left and right.
If you find early Victors.
Yeah.
You'll see that they only got one side on them because they weren't even [C#] smart enough
to see that you could put two sides when you go [A] left or right.
Edison couldn't because he was going up and down.
Put it on a cylinder.
Columbia, which was _ a _ _ _ _ group that I don't believe was a furniture [N] company per se, but that was
acting inside business relations and in research for these furniture companies, said, why don't
you just put it on both sides?
And they'd let anybody use it except for Victor.
As Victor didn't let Edison use their process.
Because Edison was, because of being such a bum that he was about the distribution,
nobody ever let him in.
In the 20s he tried to come in with putting two sides with Hill and Dale, big thick records,
but it didn't work out.
It was a lousy process.
All right, so this is how the furniture companies entered the business.
Now furniture companies knew that these Victrolas were expensive and they weren't going to sell
to poor people because poor people didn't have any money.
So they made a bunch of lousy records recording all the trash kind of junk.
Only thing that was worth anything in the days between 1902 and 1920 was some of the
opera stuff with Caruso and things like that.
They recorded just trash to try to sell these white people, these big rich people so that
they could listen to the trash that they listened to.
Now in 1920, an innovative furniture company from New York called the OK Furniture Company
recorded Crazy Blues by Mamie Smith.
_ And the OK Furniture Company found out that, my God, these poor people bought 75,000 copies
of this record.
All of a sudden they were in the music business.
Everybody's in the music business.
And from 1920 they went out, they wouldn't record men until 1925 and started doing it.
Now what did they do?
Who got paid? _
The furniture company sells a record.
They didn't pay the musician, nor did they pay the publishing.
They didn't pay the person who wrote the song.
Publishing is an old interest.
500 years of rich people.
It's called a royalty.
It comes from the kings, filtered down to you through social democratization so that
the rich people at every level, when it's democratized now, go down and steal all the
poor people's songs, put their names on them so they get paid for it.
It's called a royalty.
And so the _ _ publishing companies took the record companies to court.
And the publishing companies lost in court.
It said the furniture companies don't have to pay you guys anything.
So the publishing companies do what you're supposed to do in the United States.
They went to Congress and had laws passed.
And that's when you got BMI and ASCAP.
They said, you do not steal money from kings.
You can steal money from Lee Allen and Phil Alvin and any other musician.
You can steal their money.
But you do not steal kings money.
You don't steal the king's money.
And that's the way it goes in Congress.
And so we had BMI and all that stuff.
Now to this day, to this day, there was a little scam run on the musicians union.
90% in the late _ 60s, 90% of the money that was made from the musicians union, 90% of
the guys didn't make records.
They were just playing local gigs.
10% of the guys did make records.
The record companies were ripping off these guys money, taking their money.
So they did a thing called the phonographs recording manufacturers fund where they said
they're going to give Lee Allen a little money for all records he's on.
But what's going to happen is that artists who are royalty bearing, if you're going to
act like a king on our record, we do not have to pay you your union scale for being in there.
That's fine.
Then they give you $100,000 and they make you pay all the $100,000 back from your part
of the royalty.
However, [A#] they didn't say, well, Phil Alvin, by foregoing his royalties gave $25 [G],000 of
union things [B] so that they'd take $100,000 to track [N] 25.
Say, I only got $75,000.
I'm done.
It's a scam.
They're furniture companies.
Sony owns, makes the furniture now.
Therefore Sony needs to control the record business, which has nothing to do with music.
It has only to do with furniture.