[CL: Don’t start an e-mail to your broker or log on to Ameritrade. This is no good news about corporations.]
I’ve read recently of another in the long series of stupid corporate attempts to feign humanity, ostensibly addressing needs: a seminar on how to balance work and family. Now, I ask you: who in his right mind is going to take time away from family to attend a seminar about the family? (Probably those who are more interested in ladder climbing than in authentically being family-oriented.)
Then comes a new ASCAP magazine in the mail. More corporate muck. Notice the headline above the title below.
To the touting of “increased revenue” above, I would add this tag:
… cuts members’ profits in half by spending money on a magazine and by sending two copies to writers/publishers using the same business address
(i.e., for both the composing and publishing entities I have registered with them)
* * *
[Shakes head and dials phone.] [Yes, I’m experienced enough to remember an actual dialing action, smart enough not to have a land line at this point, and yet stupid enough not to have chucked an old telephone that has a “pulse dial” option. But this is not about my own stupidity….]
Hello, ASCAP? Yeah, this is one of your little-guy composers. You know, one of the guys only a few dozen “players” have ever heard of, despite the fact that we write decent music, too. . . .
Do you ever think about us when you do things? I mean, probably the huge majority of your membership is people like me, and yet it seems you give so much energy and resources to stuff that doesn’t serve most of us — such as advertising your bloated conferences for supposed networking with the great contemporary songwriters of our era — that you forget most of us are just out here in the trenches, writing and arranging things for two or three occasions, never expecting to receive sustained royalties for a single musical creation . . . and struggling to understand why on earth you have a policy that pays only for a small fraction of performances in educational institutions when those institutions are paying your fees just like everyone else.
Oh, it’s OK, ASCAP, don’t worry about it. We understand. You’re just another corporation that does things for the sake of itself, protecting its own assets or pandering to stockholders’ greed.
[Come to think of it, churches can be a lot like that, too.]
[Throws away magazine, despite the fact that this secular organization’s mag cover promises an article on Christian music awards.]
Earnestly Speaking 