Most of the record dealers in the country are feeling as though somebody had tossed an extra large hand grenade their way. Yesterday in page-large ads all over the country, RCA Victor announced a new policy of making classical records for one dollar (12 inch Black Label) and seventy-five cents (ten inch Black Label). This is about fifty per cent lower than the present Rod Seal classical prices.

Reason the dealers are so upset is that they depend on the high (in most cases, two-dollar) prices charged for Red Seal Classical records to give them their profits, feeling that the jazz helps only slightly, and serves more as a "loss-leader" or traffic enticement. In other words, It's very hard to run a store on just jazz records alone, unless you have a tremendous volume of business. The dealers are afraid that people will but the lower-priced, lower-profit-making Black Label, and endanger their greatest source of profit.

Don't make any mistake. The records are good, all electrically recorded with the exception of a rather suspicious-sounding Tschaikowsky "Nuboracker Suite." As a matter of fact, but for slightly higher surface noise and a little less high frequency, the records are almost as good as their Red Seal counterparts. From the standpoint of the record buyer, this is the best thing that has happened since electrical recording. It means good classical cheaply priced--a triumph of modern production method.

I listened to a recording of the Schubert "Unfinished" Symphony yesterday, as done by Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra and found it worth three dollars of anybody's money. It is almost as well rendered as the Koussevitsky-Boston Symphony of the same--and sells for half the price. Six ardent classical collectors who played the album reached the same verdict, and I quite frankly don't think that the majority of record buyers in this country, both old and new, are going to pay double for slight improvements in recording.

Victor, in a reassuring note to its dealers, says that the Red Seal sales will be affected little if any by this innovation--that the "true" record buyers are "name-conscious" to such a degree that for a few paltry dollars difference they won't descend to buying classical works rendered by competent but less famous musicians and recorded with slightly less fidelity. It feels that the new series will mean larger grosses and gradually build up public taste to a degree where they will go one step up to Red Seal.

It's interesting to inspect Victor's possible motives for price-cutting--which is what this is, regardless of what it may choose to call it. First, competition has been giving it some trouble. Victor is quite willing to admit this, and the new Black Label title selections show that it is definitely trying to undersell the recent releases by competing companies. It goes on further to say that the most important reason for the change is, beyond the new purchasers reached, an altruistic desire to bring music to the masses.

Be this as it may, the fact remains that Victor controls the German patents to the film process of recording, a means of recording on film and reproducing via light waves and photo-electric cells--something like a movie sound track. This may be wild day-dreaming, but isn't it possible that Victor is starting this line to demolish competition in the field, and realizing that it will probably injure its own Red Seal irreparably as well, doesn't particularly care, because it intends to switch in a few years to the film process anyway, which completely eliminates needle-scratch and gives much better reproduction?

In other words, record merchandising may be at a saturation-point now; Victor is shifting to a larger mass production which will more quickly reach saturation and provide a larger base for a later shift to the film medium.

It just doesn't seem possible that a company as smart as Victor would risk millions in stock and Red Seal name for a Black Label record--unless that new medium would provide a market for itself and later developments which would make it profitable. Black Label and Red Seal don't seem compatible. Black Label can exist only at over doubled volume--which Victor can't handle with its present facilities. The film process can be adapted to handle itself and the old method--consequently where the woodpile and who's going to be in it?