The agenda items, and thus blog posts are as follows:

Regional Orgs

Global Summits

Branded Shows

Stakeholder orgs

Articles of Incorporation

IRS filing status

Website & Logo

Steering Committee

Fundraising

CC Community Music Awards (CMA)

CC Hall of Fame

Elections

It is difficult to know in what order to write the blog posts. I am tempted to talk about Elections, because my personal reasons for not wanting to lead the organization are currently top of mind, but perhaps it is best saved for the end, so folks can make a decision about whether they like the direction the agenda blog posts are going. Global Summits is one I will probably wait for Ryno to finish up his Mississippi planning. Some of these might be better talked about during the October 13 meeting than written about.

IMPORTANT: This post is basically a huge downer. We’ve had a lot of great people that have volunteered for the CC CMA over the years. The failures of the CC CMA should not reflect upon them. Thanks everyone for their hard work!

With that said…the CC CMA is a project which could use some life breathed into it.

The CC CMA is a way to highlight musicians from genres and locations that the mainstream music industry normally ignores.

That is it. That’s the goal.

Along the way people have construed it as some sort of Nazi plot to destroy everything good about the world. The commentary is truly bizarre and I’m personally super over it.

Some of this commentary is probably because to simplify things we have talked about being the “Grammy’s of CC Music” and I guess that’s on me for not understanding there would be backlash to that. However, the reference was always meant to be a bit tongue-in-check. The Recording Academy’s gross receipts in 2021 (the most recent public year) were $100 million and no matter how you slice their gross assets, they are closer to $150 million than $100 million.

Like the Grammy’s, the CC CMA now has a larger org that runs them, namely Friends of CC Music. The Friends of CC Music’s assets are this site and http://ccmusicawards.com (even this is complicated since technically Friends of CC Music doesn’t exist, these properties belong to Doug and Mike, respectively, but whatever). Frankly, it doesn’t matter if the cost is $50 or $100. We are talking 1 to 2 million TIMES as much.

So, first and foremost, we need to figure out if we want to keep this going. If we do, we need to figure out how to do it. I’ve been running CC CMA since 2017 and even though there are some success stories due to the volunteers I mentioned at the beginning, I really don’t think anybody should be taking my vision for this project if it moves forward.

That said, it might be important to talk about my vision here because it ties into some of the other projects. Alright kids, cover your ears! Like the Grammy’s (boo! hiss!) I wanted to have an “in-person” awards ceremony. Maybe we call it a “recognition ceremony” since people think awards are bad or something. idk.

I don’t know the scientific literature on the topic, but I left Epic in 2011 and I know for a fact screen fatigue was already a concern then. Workrave’s initial release was in 2002. The problems were magnified during the global shutdown, but these are not new phenomenon. Jitsi calls are great for connecting us across the world, but they aren’t actually great for us.

People need to be in proximity to each other. Not that this is the point of this post, but perhaps it is worth mentioning that this doesn’t mean people necessarily need to work from an office. Office culture is different than being with friends for…lots of reasons.

We need to gather in physical space as a community. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to travel very far. I am pretty certain there are CC Music folks in NYC that have not met up with each other. I know there are folks in Minneapolis with which I have never met up with (Oak Pantheon immediately comes to mind).

Back when Tom and I start Music Manumit, our initial goal was to have a local show to bring people together. Ryno largely made that happen in Milwaukee, and one of the goals I have for this organization is to help folks replicate what Ryno is doing with his series of shows.

But shows are not the only reason to get together. Whether we get together to recognize interesting releases from the year or we just get together for tea, ultimately it doesn’t matter.

We have the URL, it’s up to the community what we do with it.