This situation tends to compound a confusion, already too prevalent, between artistic quality on the one hand, and those factors which lead to easy public success on the other. From this confusion arises a whole series of premises and tendencies which affect the character both of prevailing criteria, and, as a natural consequence, of the impact of these criteria on our music life in general. It would certainly be misleading to ascribe all these ideas and tendencies to the said situation; obviously many date from an earlier period in which the American public was much less sophisticated than it is today and our music life far less developed. However, apart from the caution and conservatism of business itself (which must base its policies on facts ascertained by past experience and not on mortgages on the future), many of these premises and tendencies admirably serve the purpose of the system itself. We need only remember a single elementary fact: that a business, in order to survive, at least in the United States of today, must produce its goods as cheaply as possible and sell them at the highest possible price. Or, from another point of view, it must persuade the public to buy precisely what is economically most convenient to produce. In the complex state of affairs which we may term “music business,” these procedures are calculated in an exact manner. The objection centers here. If, for instance, the so-called “star system” as it exists here today were completely spontaneous and natural, one might perhaps speak of the musical immaturity of a large part of the public, recognizing at the same time that the virtuoso as such has been in one form or the other, everywhere and at all times, a glamorous figure. The evils of the situation arise not so much from the fact that adulation of the virtuoso is exploited, but from the obvious manner in which that adulation has been cultivated and controlled by business interests.