Vocally Speaking and Otherwise... Quality versus Cheap Bargain Deals?

I have been running the Royans professional Vocal School since February 15th of 1984. 

By the way, at that time, it was called the Royans School for the Musical Performing Arts. We opened it at first as a regular Italian neighborhood music school.

Outside of myself, we had 6 or 7 junior instructors and not just for vocals, but for the variety of musical instruments we taught.

Almost 29 years ago now, there was a vastly different world. We had over 100 students and over 7 teachers and a huge demand for our services from both children and adult populations. 

For each musical discipline, we had a certain curriculum, the certain set of hours attributed to each of them, and definitely, a set price for each and every course we were delivering.

Those were the days when we had a rotary phone on our desk, and a tape answering machine. And a few years later, we even acquired a typewriter, as strange as it sounds today. My assistant, who is to date 25 years old, while writing this along my side, was looking at me with big surprise in his eyes. Understandably, It’s pretty much all foreign to him. I, though, was trying to persuade him that the business and the people associating with that business, those days, (students, teachers and associates), were far more profound in they're thinking and their actions along with their thinking and their conduct. They did respect the structure associated with our business then.

I can not recall anybody at that time who would be asking for reduced tuition fees or trying to impose their own rules onto our music institution. On that note , in Russia, they have a saying:

"Don’t come to somebody else’s church with your own prayer".

Nowadays, and almost 3 decades later, people do exactly that. They come with their own rules and regulations and impose and  demand from us bargains and discounts of all sorts.

Moreover, lately, they announce out loud that in their opinion, our vocal program is too ELITE for them, and that they have no intention to become professional singers and therefore, even our junior instructors price, which is 1/5th of my own designed for a professional use course price, is too much for them, as  they look for a cheap bargain and are being absolutely not concerned about any quality of our instruction and expertise on whichever level/junior or senior.

By the way, with respect of the price for the junior instructors trained by me, I have to note that we have not changed the price for at least the last 20 years. And we are teaching the Vocal Science (TM) method which is not available anywhere in the world! The prices for the junior instructors, however, are the same, or even less, then in any of the regular vocal schools.

Go figure!

The moral of it is;

Nowadays, people are concerned not about what they have acquired as a product, and not the quality of it, but how much they are paying for it, and wether or not they can get by somewhat using it for various reasons.

How sad is that?

The quality food, the quality services, the quality music, singing, acting, and etc, are bargained down to the absolute bottom.

All of that suggests that our society with all of the greatest technology and supposed progress forward, degraded severely and going down that road rapidly.

I hope that it is not bottomless though, and thus, my hope is that when the todays’ society reaches the absolute bottom, then, by the law of physics, it will bounce back like a boomerang and bring all of us back on top and hopefully, on even higher ground then we once had been to begin with.