Just as route operators have owned most of the jukeboxes, cigarette
machines, arcade machines, and other coin-operated devices in major
U.S. cities, they owned most of the coin-operated pianos and
orchestrions in the 1920s.

The route operator provided new music rolls and performed maintenance.
In doing so, he relieved individual location owners of learning how to
maintain complicated devices that many didn't want to learn how to
service.  Although J.P. Seeburg advertised coin pianos and orchestrions
heavily to music stores in the early days from 1909 through about 1920,
after prohibition was in effect his son N. Marshall focused on selling
to regional distributors who in turn sold to route operators.

Each year from the mid-1920s through the end of the coin piano era, the
Seeburg company hosted annual dinners for their distributors.  Marshall
was not only responsible for promoting the distributor/operator system,
but also for making the change from piano to jukebox manufacturing,
getting jukeboxes on the market by 1928.

In Minnesota, the Electric Violin Company, formed in 1921, owned about
300 Mills Violanos and placed them on location in that and surrounding
states.  Later, they owned about 300 Western Electric coin pianos, and
in 1928, the first Western Electric (Seeburg subsidiary) jukeboxes.
This company was owned by Ed Wurdeman, his sons Art and Ozzie, and Herb
Oslund.  (The latter invented and marketed the Oslund key recovering
machines, familiar to many piano technicians.)

During the depression, many of the instruments were scrapped, while
others too far from home were simply left behind.  Ozzie made a
sub-floor in his garage from Violano piano back structures after
removing metal parts and turning them in to the World War II scrap
drive.  After the war, he remained in the music machine servicing and
restoration business until the early 1970s.

His son Tom continues in business today, with the Wurdemans being the
only family known to the author who have been in this business ever
since the 1920s---over 80 years! This story is told in more detail with
illustrations in my book "The Golden Age of Automatic Musical
Instruments."

Few operators gave the location owner 50% of the coin intake,
especially in large cities where "organizations" controlled the
machines.  For insight into how this worked, read "Jukeboxes - An
American Social History" by Kerry Segrave, available from major book
dealers online.  The book focuses on jukeboxes rather than coin pianos,
but the operating system was similar.

The relative scarcity of coin pianos and orchestrions today is due in
part to the fact that very few route operators had any interest in
paying warehouse fees to store dozens or hundreds of obsolete pianos
that they had replaced with jukeboxes.  Instead, the pianos went to the
dump.  The same thing happened to most jukeboxes as newer, flashier
models were introduced every year or two, with the operators constantly
encouraged by distributors to replace the older models.

Art Reblitz
http://www.reblitzrestorations.com/