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Garet Garrett, Ouroboros, or the Mechanical Extension of Mankind (NYC: Dutton, 1926) labors to explain what a player piano means:

As I write, the strains of a Liszt rhapsody float into my window. They come from a farmer’s cottage a little way down the road. Yesterday a motor truck stopped at his house and unloaded a self-playing piano. I saw it and noticed that it got slightly damaged squeezing through the tiny doorway. What does this mean? First, it means that day before yesterday a salesman from the city went through this road selling self-playing pianos for a nominal cash sum down and the balance on monthly instalments. He sold one there, another in the next house but one, and a third further on. How many he sold to the end of the road I do not know.

But what does it mean that the city sends a man through a country road in southern New Jersey to sell pianos in this beguiling manner to people who cannot afford them? Those who bought them I know were all in debt for other things bought on the instalment plan. It means there is a necessity to sell this industrial product. It is the necessity of a factory that has overtaken the normal demand for self-playing pianos and must force the sale of its surplus. It is the necessity of all who work in that factory and live thereby. It is the necessity of industry in general, governed as it is by a principle it did not invent. [pp.11–12]

PDF (109pp., 3.2MB) here, courtesy of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a/k/a Tragedy Central.

William Gaddis sees things a bit differently (“‘Stop Player. Joke No. 4‘”), but notes:

More than 200,000 player pianos were built in 1916. They amounted to 65 percent of the total piano production, enough to satisfy the most ardent fanatic and to warn anyone familiar with business graph curves of the impending decline and fall.

(Garrett via Risks)