The ASCAP-BMI Feud, Status Panic, and the Struggle for Cold War Consensus

Abstract

AbstractBy the 1950s, ASCAP and its associated songwriters and composers seemed out of touch with contemporary musical tastes and industry trends. With the introduction of competition in the form of BMI in 1939, many members of ASCAP were experiencing a sense of status anxiety, an anxiety exacerbated by the many cultural, social, political, and economic changes that swept across postwar US society. Rather than adapt to the changing musical landscape of the 1950s, some members argued that ASCAP's fading cultural prestige and diminished influence within the music industry were the result of a conspiracy perpetrated by the broadcast networks and BMI. This article examines how, in an attempt to reassert the status and prestige they had enjoyed before the war, ASCAP and its supporters exploited contemporary Cold War anxieties as part of their ongoing feud with BMI. In congressional hearings from 1956 and 1958, individuals and organizations sympathetic to ASCAP portrayed BMI as part of a coordinated conspiracy that not only threatened free market practices through the establishment of an alleged “electronic curtain,” but also sought to foist an inferior product on audiences who were being manipulated by “hidden persuaders.” I suggest that the rhetoric that dominated both of these hearings reflects ideological debates that were being fought at the height of the Cold War, debates involving the culture of consensus and the image of the “American Way.”