page_title: Bing Crosby
section_title: Role in early tape recording
hierarchical_section_title: Bing Crosby / Entrepreneurship / Role in early tape recording
caption_attribution_description: Publicity photo of Bing Crosby, Perry Como and Arthur Godfrey, who were guests on Bing Crosby's 24 May 1950 CBS radio program.
context_page_description: Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby Jr. was an American singer, comedian and actor. The first multimedia star, Crosby was a leader in record sales, radio ratings, and motion picture grosses from 1930 to 1954, he made over seventy feature films and recorded more than 1,600 different songs.
  His early career coincided with recording innovations that allowed him to develop an intimate singing style that influenced many male singers who followed him, including Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, Dick Haymes, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, and Dean Martin.
  Yank magazine said that he was "the person who had done the most for the morale of overseas servicemen" during World War II. In 1948, American polls declared him the "most admired man alive, ” ahead of Jackie Robinson and Pope Pius XII. Also in 1948, Music Digest estimated that his recordings filled more than half of the 80,000 weekly hours allocated to recorded radio music.
  Crosby won an Oscar for Best Actor for his role as Father Chuck O'Malley in the 1944 motion picture Going My Way and was nominated for his reprise of the role in The Bells of St.
context_section_description: During the Golden Age of Radio, performers had to create their shows live, sometimes even redoing the program a second time for the west coast time zone. Crosby had to do two live radio shows on the same day, three hours apart, for the East and West Coasts. Crosby's radio career took a significant turn in 1945, when he clashed with NBC over his insistence that he be allowed to pre-record his radio shows. (The live production of radio shows was also reinforced by the musicians' union and ASCAP, which wanted to ensure continued work for their members.) In On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, John Dunning wrote about German engineers having developed a tape recorder with a near-professional broadcast quality standard:
  [Crosby saw] an enormous advantage in prerecording his radio shows. The scheduling could now be done at the star's convenience. He could do four shows a week, if he chose, and then take a month off. But the networks and sponsors were adamantly opposed. The public wouldn't stand for 'canned' radio, the networks argued. There was something magic for listeners in the fact that what they were hearing was being performed and heard everywhere, at that precise instant. Some of the best moments in comedy came when a line was blown and the star had to rely on wit to rescue a bad situation. Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Phil Harris, and also Crosby were masters at this, and the networks weren't about to give it up easily.
  Crosby's insistence eventually factored into the further development of magnetic tape sound recording and the radio industry's widespread adoption of it. He used his clout, both professional and financial, for innovations in audio. But NBC and CBS refused to broadcast prerecorded radio programs. Crosby left the network and remained off the air for seven months, creating a legal battle with his sponsor Kraft that was settled out of court. He returned to broadcasting for the last 13 weeks of the 1945–1946 season.
  The Mutual network, on the other hand, pre-recorded some of its programs as early as 1938 for The Shadow with Orson Welles. ABC was formed from the sale of the NBC Blue Network in 1943 after a federal antitrust suit and was willing to join Mutual in breaking the tradition. ABC offered Crosby $30,000 per week to produce a recorded show every Wednesday that would be sponsored by Philco. He would get an additional $40,000 from 400 independent stations for the rights to broadcast the 30-minute show, which was sent to them every Monday on three 16-inch (40-cm) lacquer discs that played ten minutes per side at 33 rpm.
  Crosby wanted to change to recorded production for several reasons. The legend that has been most often told is that it would give him more time for golf. He did record his first Philco Radio Time program in August 1947 so he could enter the Jasper National Park Invitational Golf Tournament in September when the radio season was to start. But golf was not the most important reason. He wanted better quality recording, the ability to eliminate mistakes and the need to perform a second live show for the West Coast, and to control the timing of his performances. Because Bing Crosby Enterprises produced the show, he could purchase the best audio equipment and arrange the microphones his way; microphone placement had been debated in studios since the beginning of the electrical era. He would no longer have to wear the toupee that CBS and NBC required for his live audience shows—he preferred a hat. He could also record short promotions for his latest investment, the world's first frozen orange juice, sold under the brand name Minute Maid. This investment allowed him to make more money by finding a loophole where the IRS couldn't tax him at a 77% rate.
  Murdo MacKenzie of Bing Crosby Enterprises had seen a demonstration of the German Magnetophon in June 1947—the same device that Jack Mullin had brought back from Radio Frankfurt with 50 reels of tape, at the end of the war. It was one of the magnetic tape recorders that BASF and AEG had built in Germany starting in 1935. The 6.5mm ferric-oxid
caption: With Perry Como and Arthur Godfrey in 1950
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