USA Songwriting Game: PAY to Play Russian Roulette

So, you think you wrote a good song. Wanna bet $35 on it?

The USA SONGWRITING wiseguys are betting that thousands upon thousands of egocentric and naive idiots will be doing just that...throwing down $35 PER SONG (oh, 6 song maximum, let's not be greedy) to win a contest.

Hurry, the latest greedfest closes May 29th.

USA SONGWRITING has been at it a long time. Publicity-hungry songwriters and music industry people help "judge" the songs and contribute articles to their site. Very slick. Quoting from a Paul Simon song...

"The music suffers. The music business thrives."

I'd amend it to The MUSICIAN suffers, but we all know that, and it doesn't scan. But there are scams...

Glowing up from that green-yellow slime, is the come on: "YOU can WIN."

Maybe you saw a link for this from some Farcebook musician. Maybe a helpful friend sent along, with a cheerful challenge, "I bet you can WIN this." How do you back down and say "Gosh, I'm not any good, I won't even try for a lousy $35..."

And so USA SONGWRITING (and others, and tons of variations on this for poets, short story writers, etc.) make money. They thrive.

I won't even speculate on whether the grand prize winner turns out to be somebody's brother. Bob Dylan said "even the swap meets are gettin' pretty corrupt," so who knows about so-called contests?

Longtime readers here will note, I've BEEN in the publishing world...and yes, I've seen corrupt contests and promotions of all types. One amusing one was the men's mag that offered "real pubic hair" clipped from a luscious model.

It was a model who could've been dead or alive. They just found a generic picture and made up a name, as I recall. Or maybe she approved but then changed her mind. Why would she want to send a small thatch to some maniac who might do a voodoo ritual with it? Or decide he wanted MORE. Either way, as the contest was ending...NO PUBES, GLORIOUS PUBES.

What I vividly remember is that they wanted the contest to be real, and show the winner picked at random from a box of entries. They just didn't care if the "real pubic hair" was fake. One day they were marching around the office, holding up a photo of this cunt (literally) and asking, "Do your pubes match this color?" They asked the editorial staff, the secretaries and freelancers who were dropping off the clean "redeeming social value" articles in between the girlie spread. They even accosted men with beards.

Meanwhile, back at the songwriting contest...why is it that almost always there's a "reading fee" or a "processing fee" whether it's a non-profit or not?

Very, very few contests for songs, poems, stories or scripts EVER say "free to enter." Is it that they don't have the staff to handle the mail? No, I think it's that they found, long ago, that there were plenty who'd pay, and who cares about the starving and struggling talents who couldn't??

I think I could come up with the winning lyric:

"I've entered your contest!
I think that it's nifty.
If I am the winner,
we'll split fifty-fifty."