The player piano was a digital recording and playback system.
Piano-roll companies bought sheet music and ripped the notes
printed on it into 0s and 1s on a long roll of computer tape,
which they sold by the thousands -- the hundreds of thousands --
the millions. They did this without a penny's compensation to the
publishers. They were digital music pirates. Arrrr!
Predictably, the composers and music publishers went nutso. Sousa
showed up in Congress to say that:
These talking machines are going to ruin the
artistic development of music in this
country. When I was a boy...in front of every
house in the summer evenings, you would find
young people together singing the songs of
the day or old songs. Today you hear these
infernal machines going night and day. We
will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal
chord will be eliminated by a process of
evolution, as was the tail of man when he
came from the ape.
The publishers asked Congress to ban the piano roll and to create
a law that said that any new system for reproducing music should
be subject to a veto from their industry association.