The music business came close to collapsing during the Great Depression. In Chicago, shivering jobless men burned old phonograph records to keep warm. American record companies, which had sold more than 100 million copies a year in the mid-20s, were soon selling just six million (pbs.org). Most of them went out of business. The Victor Company stopped making record players for a time and instead sold radios and radio programs. In site of the hardships, the 1930s was a great decade in American music. Anyone with access to a radio could listen to it for free. Just like going to the movies, music and dancing made people forget the hardships of daily life. The most popular type of music during this decade were jazz or swing. People danced to the big band tunes of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey. Louis Armstrong expanded his repertoire (livinghistoryfarm.org). In addition to playing trumpet, he sang and performed on radio. Songs written in the 1930s by Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers are still sung today. Cole Porter musicals were popular on Broadway in New York City. George Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" premiered in 1935. Stars on film and in the sound booth, Fred Astaire and Judy Garland let us know of an alliance between the Hollywood machinery, the record industry and radio that grew in strength and influence as the decade wore on. The trademark sound of the Glen Miller Orchestra "Moonlight Serenade" would provide a generation with musical memories of American life during the Second World War (xroads.virginia.edu).