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.