Craig Alden got to Jamie Records through Shapiro Bernstein Music, which arranged the productions that came out on Jamie, plus some other novelty tunes left in the can. A well-established music publisher of standards like “Red Sails in the Sunset” and “Glory of Love,” the publisher had its heyday when its song pluggers got songs played by big bands over national radio. It was the era that established the practice of radio stations paying only for songs being played on the air, not for the artist, an issue that continued to haunt the industry throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For while it made sense for the bgi bands not to collect royalties for their radio performances, the situation was quite different when artists actually made hit records and unique contributions to the success of the songs. In the early 1960s, established music publishers switched their attention to the new music industry and produced records in the hopes of generating airplay and were even willing to let other labels put out the records so that the airplay would generation performance income. Craig Alden and Jamie benefited from the top-notch recordings provided with the Craig Alden singles, though the expense and prospects of any given song were a much longer shot than when a song plugger only needed sheet music to get national airplay.
