Business History

Once if you wrote a hit song there was no guarantee it would make you rich. So songwriters formed a cartel - the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. ASCAP started suing concert halls, cafes and nightclubs to claim back royalties. Seemed fair... except ASCAP started a war when it demanded radio stations turn over 10% of their revenues.
ASCAP's monopoly on music rights was broken, but they'd made songs into valuable financial assets. This set the scene for an epic copyright beef between Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson, and for David Bowie to turn his pop hits into a complex special purpose vehicle... a securitization pool!
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Ford was the pre-eminent American car maker and Henry Ford was the king of modern manufacturing, until a Michigan cigar salesman decided to consolidate a bunch of small auto companies into a single firm to defeat the Colossus of Detroit.
General Motors united the likes of Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac and decided to live by "the laws of Paris dressmakers" to make cars that were more stylish and fashionable than the austere, black-painted Model T that was coming out of the Ford plant.
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Farm boy Henry Ford hated toil. If only someone could invent ways to work more efficiently, as well as cheap, reliable machines to take some of the strain. Ford was a tinkerer and a lover of the newly invented automobile - so he started building cars in a new, streamlined way that made them affordable to many more Americans.
Thanks to Ford’s production line techniques, the Model T became the biggest selling car in the world. And other factories copied his system to manufacture the radios and vacuum cleaners that kickstarted the modern boom in consumerism. But then Henry Ford stopped listening to what car buyers wanted.
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Old-fashioned ways of preserving food made for salty, vinegary or chewy meals - but it was often a choice between that or starving. Soldiers, explorers and ordinary people alike faced malnutrition and food poisoning - but then came a French revolution... in a can!
First invented in Napoleonic France, the humble can would feed armies; sustain bold exploration; and give poor people access to wholesome food all year round. We don't think about the tin can much today, but its history is filled with skullduggery, vast riches and deadly choking hazards.
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Mom and Pops grocery stores were charming, but inefficient. They contributed to Americans either spending a lot on their food or having to go hungry. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company changed the entire model. The A&P established a chain of stores selling branded goods at the lowest prices.
The A&P kept its profit margins slim and allowed Americans to buy more food for less - but this wasn't celebrated as a success story. Politicians, radio stars and vested interests ganged together to hound The A&P. They demanded the grocery chain change its strategy, raise prices and even put its owners on trial on criminal charges. So why didn't America like cheap groceries?
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