Christer,
Thank you once again for responding to my yearly email concerning the Melody Festival rules. I appreciate you taking time to once again do so. This year I have begun a debate in the Studio Magazine forum and invite you to participate.
The concern that I’m voicing is not based upon the relationship of SVT to SMFF, but that the Melody Festival rule set, which is written by SVT, assigns SMFF the task of judging the initial entries, even though members of that organization have a monetary interest in the ultimate success of competition songs, since they act as agents for some of the contestants. It seems like leaving the fox to guard the hen house, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t some other organization that has less conflict of interest be the initial song filter? It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that a grossly disproportionate number of ‘approved’ songs come from members of SMFF. In my opinion it is unethical to ask the public to spend time recording songs for the contest, when the chance that they have to be chosen is much less than song writers who have a publisher in SMFF. It is misleading for SVT to state that there were 3000 entries, when 2900 of them were very possibly summarily dismissed by the SMFF.
I invite you to participate in the debate going on in the Studio magazine forum at https://www.studio.se/index.php?showtopic=26913. This letter will, of course, be posted there. Given that a large number of amateur and semi-professional song writers can be found there, it might be very constructive for you to read their views. Given the current rule set, it appears that the true purpose of the song contest is to promote the music of the Swedish Music Publisher’s Union, in which case I think that ‘melody festival’ is an inappropriate name and ‘SMFF Promotion Festival’ should replace it.
Sincerely,
Kirk Clendinning
Did you get any reply to this? I'm curious as the debate is interesting.