The Composition Pyramid Scheme

Every industry has its hierarchies. Ours has pyramids.
They all point upwards.
They all depend on belief from below.

1. The Academic Pyramid

Students pay to be trained as composers.
Graduates teach the next wave of students.
Jobs are almost nonexistent, so the cycle repeats.
A pyramid of hope built on debt.
Scam.

2. The Funding Pyramid

Thousands apply for small grants.
Panels are staffed by the previously funded.
The same names rise again and again.
The rhetoric is fairness; the practice is recursion.
Scam.

3. The Festival Pyramid

Open calls attract hundreds of submissions.
A few are chosen to prove the openness of the process.
The rest prove the need for the process.
Innovation becomes a quota.
Scam.

4. The Publisher Pyramid

Publishers no longer distribute; they consecrate.
They choose composers who already have attention.
They call it discovery; it’s endorsement.
The catalogue is a mirror of fashion.
Scam.

5. The Ideological Pyramid

Composers learn the approved language.
Administrators enforce it.
Institutions display it.
Virtue as currency.
Scam.

Every layer depends on the illusion that the next will be different.
Every participant sustains the system by believing in it just long enough.
Once, composition was a profession — something you did because you could do nothing else, because the work itself was its own justification.
Now it’s an industry: scalable, measurable, promotable.
The pyramids stand because belief still flows upward. The moment it stops, they fall.