At MakeMusic and Alfred Music, we know that our future as an organization relies on two simple things: our customers and our employees.
MakeMusic’s vision is to transform how music is composed, taught, learned, and performed. This is only possible if we carefully listen to our users. Their feedback helps our teams build better, more relevant and easier-to-use products.
Since 1922, Alfred has been committed to helping people experience the joy of making music. Our content is inspired by the passion and dedication we’re seeing everyday when interacting with our authors, teachers and performers.
It takes great teams and employees to execute these missions.
We have to understand and leverage our customers’ thoughts, opinions, advice and sometimes frustrations. Our frontline employees daily interact with the world in all its diversity: musicians of all ages, nationalities, backgrounds, opinions and sensibilities. We pride ourselves in the values that are demonstrated by our employees everyday when supporting a diverse world of musicians: respect, tolerance, open-mindedness and patience.
We’re expecting the same values from our customers.
We know that when using tech tools, creating, teaching and learning music can come with some frustration, and maybe even some anger. Most of the time there is a very clear and useful rationale behind these feelings, which is beneficial to us so we can make better products.
In certain situations though, we see this frustration translating into direct aggressiveness towards our employees who by default want to help. This is at best unfair and counterproductive. Yet it becomes inadmissible when this hostility targets who our employees are: their race, gender, gender expression, ethnicity and/or culture.
In such extreme cases, we will stand by our employees.
We will update our terms of service in the coming weeks to clearly reflect these views, and allow Alfred Music and MakeMusic’s executive team the right to deny support or access to our products and services when the nature of interactions with our staff is anything other than professional and respectful. We know this is the right thing to do and we know that’s what our users would do too.
Thanks for spreading the joy of making music with our products and with your passion!
Greg Dell’Era, MakeMusic and Alfred Music President
Johann Gouws, Senior Vice President, Customer Team
Heath Mathews, Senior Vice President, Content and Licensing