1927

  • Steinway & Sons’ net profit is $646,000.
  • Steinway & Sons’ real estate profit made since 1921 until this year is about $750,000 – over 200% of the profit made by Steinway & Sons from piano sales in Europe through the same period. The company even offers financing for land and home construction. Theodore E. Steinway encourages Steinway & Sons workers to take company’s real estate loans, wishing to have the workers housed well, and close to Astoria factories.
  • Steinway & Sons invests another $1,000,000 in the expansion of the Astoria factories.
  • Steinway & sons builds a Model M Steinway & Sons grand piano #252,316 with a cracked soundboard, for experimental / marketing purposes. (This piano will be mentioned in a story, published in Fortune magazine in 1934, and would easily explain the notorious Steinway & Sons soundboard problems of the 1990s.)
  • By this year Steinway Artists campaign has expanded to include several dozens of musicians, and each of them receive free pianos not only for concerts, but also for their homes (in addition to other perquisites). Over 600 Steinway & Sons pianos, owned by the company and maintained at its expense, move continuously all around the United States and abroad, free to musicians, halls and dealers that house them. Within Steinway & Sons’ Concert and Artists department, the free service provided to Steinway Artists are organized by special classification. Four Class A pianists (Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Joseph Hofmann, Mischa Levitzki and Yolanda Mero) can choose their pianos, receive free services of a traveling tuner, an a fee of $100 per performance. Class B pianists (Sergei Rachmaninoff, Vladimir Horowitz, Dame Myra Hess, Rudolph Ganz, Alfred Cortot, and Olga Samaroff) do not get paid $100 per concert, but otherwise receive the same free services, including the right to choose their pianos, and the free tuner. The Class C includes other musicians besides pianists: George Gershwin, Percy Grainger, Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, Wanda Landowska, Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Siloti, and Efrem Zimbalist – anyone in this group is simply provided with a free piano, wherever they perform, and a piano is shipped by Steinway & Sons only if no appropriate piano is already available in town.