But a late development in the business, one which suspiciously smacks of a restraint of trade violation, is the practice of some publishers of giving a stock interest in their firms to noted crooners, band leaders and disk jockeys, who in return "plug" the latest publications of the companies in which they are interested.
An offshoot of this kind of tie-up, which has the further effect of keeping the compositions of the unknown or the unelect from the market, is off-the-record agreements between the principal publishing houses tied up with singers and band leaders to play only the product of the companies in the charmed circle. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.
The demonstrating offices are besieged by ambitious youngsters, failures and never-could-be's who think that they can find a "Yes, We Have No Bananas" or "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" to draw them to the top overnight. These are inconsequential persons and they are insulted and refused, but they break through here and there.
For a bad singer, all songs are bad. Yet it is in the nature of the stage-struck never to admit that they have failed, but to carry the deathless conviction that it is the "material." They haunt the music publishers, fighting for a chance at the latest, always with high expectations that this time this will be it.
So the Brill Building, overrun as it was for years with every element of the prize ring and the sheet music world and its vocalists and hoofers and bandsmen, naturally became a beehive for minor agents, who pick up shabby fees from unimportant performers.
Some of these have offices in telephone booths and some of them only in their hats. For a commission they will try to sell anything to anybody. They watch the cheap saloons for a "disappointment"--which means that an act has fallen out temporarily or permanently because of delirium tremens, dismissal or death; they try to induce other saloons, without entertainers, to try some--find small, off-key dens and seek to sell them a singer or a sister act. The amount of aggressiveness and persistence they put into their misspent endeavors would probably get them a good income anywhere else--but they would be out of "show business," and they never will be.