The Aeolian Company was a musical-instrument making firm whose products included player organs, pianos, sheet music, records and phonographs.

In 1904 Aeolian sued the Los Angeles Art Organ Company for patent infringement of its player mechanism, leading to court victories that, with other factors, effectively shut down a competitor.

As the pianola, in its turn, was supplanted by the newer Aeolian's "Duo Art" reproducing piano (1913), which could reproduce the sound of a famous artist playing without manual intervention, the Aeolian, Weber Piano & Pianola Co. became the world's leading manufacturer of such roll-operated instruments.

An attempt of the company to engage in the production of church and concert organs resulted in important installations at Duke University Chapel and Longwood Gardens.

On January 27, 1917, R. J. Reynolds placed an order with the Aeolian Company for a pipe organ with four keyboards and a pedal footboard.

[7] In 1974, Aeolian sold pianos under the brand names of Mason & Hamlin, Chickering, Knabe, Hardman & Peck, Winter, Cable, and Ivers & Pond.

[8][9]Aeolian was first located at 841 Broadway, in the heart (and soul) of the piano district; the company later moved to 23rd Street, and then to 360 Fifth Avenue.

[11] The player piano deeply troubled popular music composers such as John Philip Sousa.

These rolls were scrolls of paper with holes punched out in patterns that instructed the piano how to play a particular song.

The Court held that because humans could not read player piano rolls, they were not in fact copies of the musical compositions they encoded.

In short, since 1909 the copyright law has allowed musicians to copy others’ songs by mechanical means (e.g., via piano roll or phonorecord/sound recording) without asking permission, so long as they paid a specified fee to the original songwriter.