The war dawned on a powerful music industry which was determined to continue to show its respectability through voluble patriotism, but within which its different actors also scrambled to position themselves in the new context, in order to ensure that the war would not harm them commercially and might even improve their profitability. Whether artistes or theatre chains, songwriters or record companies, each actor was obliged to take into account this new factor which added itself to the multiple existing constraints of their professions. This paper will evaluate these constraints and the weight of the new context, and will also attempt to judge the alleged jingoism of music halls of the time, by examining it within a much wider corpus of the songs of 1914, of which the vast majority did not speak of the war.