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By Root 1950 0

of pirated music was therefore impressive but futile. On February 1903, only four months after the new law had gone into effect, the Metropolitan Police suspended its enforcement. Eventually a compromise would be reached whereby the police held copies for a year before destroying them. But the newlawwas ineffective for other reasons too. In particular, it had been initially envisaged to provide strong powers to enter pirates' lairs and detain suspects, but these clauses had been removed in its passage through Parliament.19 With no power to detain, no power to force one's way into private premises-magistrates were still ruling in favor of the pirates on this-and no power to fine offenders, the police and publishers still stood no chance of inflicting more than glancing damage. The MCA even tried to prosecute hawkers as unlicensed peddlers, drawing on laws that dated back to the seventeenth century; but this tactic too could do nothing to hurt the real pirates. The only other option was to go after pirates for not printing their names on title pages, which was illegal under newspaper law. But the publishers needed the permission of the attorney general to pursue this course, and four times he refused on the grounds that the law was intended against sedition and blasphemy, not to uphold a private interest. Eventually they gave up.20 The campaign's futility had in the end drawn public attention to the weaknesses of the publishers' own position.

With criticism mounting, some in the trade saw a need to change direction. Day himselfwas the first to break ranks. The pirates were right in claiming that there was a demand for cheap music, as he admitted later, adding that he was "not above taking a lesson out of the pirates' book in that way."" In the Daily Mail, the organ of lower-middle-class cultural aspiration, he now announced the launch of a new sixpenny music series. Francis, Day and Hunter would issue at 6d songs previously sold only at 18d or as. The new price was far more competitive with that of the pirates. The first issues of this series, comprising both new and old music, appeared in October 1903. A direct result of the combination of pianos and piracy, the new venture was a radical departure for the orthodox trade. Leslie Stuart, whose Soldiers of the 2 een was a mainstay of the sixpenny editions, remarked that it amounted to "an admission of the claims made by the defenders of the pirates that publishers have been robbing the pub- lic."22 And the publishers' critics were, if anything, delighted to be vindicated in such an emphatic way. This was the "day of cheap music at last," hailed the piratical Popular Music Stores of Doncaster in the local press. For once, "the elect in the musical world must recognize the increasing desire of the masses to share in the refining pleasures of high-class music." Even the staunchlypro-publisher trade journal Musical Opinion proclaimed a "Revolution."

The campaign against music piracy was unraveling. Rather than forcing the pirates into line, Day's own firm had broken ranks and accepted their pricing levels. It seemed to acknowledge the increasinglywidespread perception that the mainstream publishers had not been acting in accord with the popular interest. Even the new sixpenny series soon looked as though it would fail to undermine piracy, however, because the pirates quickly learned to use the legitimate pieces as "cover" for their own (that is, the hawkers would tout a pile of pirated music beneath a top copy of one of the sixpenny pieces).23 Meanwhile the MCA, by now far less confident, had fallen strangely silent. So successful, so enterprising were the pirates in building up networks of manufacturing and distribution that, as one songster warned, they seemed to be "becoming publishers in their own way."24 If that actually happened, then they would truly have won their war.

ARTHUR PRESTON AND THE PLACES OF PIRACY

For want of a better strategy, the publishers now decided to return to what Abbott called their "`smash and grab' method." With Day and Abbott's MCArather discredited,