Deceitful company Wife bought Masterclass last year. Watched a few short series. Forgot about it due to the limited interesting content. She bought it at a discount "buy 1, get 2". We've tried to redeem that 2nd membership. Only got errors from the website. Funny thing, I receive an email the day after the 2nd "free" membership that we never were able to activate to tell me they've fixed the issue and now it should work. At that point, we can't activate it and support will not do anything about this. If you ask me, this is intentional and really just a deceitful marketing scheme. Overall, too expensive for the limited amount of short interesting content. Will not touch again and recommend you do the same.

The masterclasses are like bitesize… The masterclasses are like bitesize info documentaries with only top-level information. Its ok but you are not going to get real detail, very light touch. I think if Masterclass were confident enough to give customers a taster course, they would probably get better reviews because their audience would be more aligned. It’s very magazine style that alludes to more meaningful content. Guessing that’s the need for the lack of transparently and gotch on renewal charges after a years signup. Sadly not for me.

Music and cooking is legit; anything writing, business, film is gimmicky I am for better or worse in life meeting some of the people who teach Masterclass sessions but not at their level of financial success yet, so this caught my interest. I was given a free trial to check out and really did my homework so I decided to keep the year account for the music and cooking only. Music is the best. Courses are either for beginners or intermediate. There are real courses for people with less experience, or confidence, in crafting professional music tracks on Ableton or Logic Pro. The violin class is worth it because everyone in music, every genre is going to work with professional violinists. That’s not a metaphorical question. You will with certainty need to know about violins. The film scoring classes by Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman are with 100% accuracy what a film score composer and a team do every day. People complaining about a lack of theory in them need to know the job isn’t all music theory or chasing fame. You work years, decades for it. Hans Zimmer’s class is beautifully taught. What he says, he really tells people I meet who’ve worked with him! Whoever wants music theory can pick and choose from the mix of classes and get the career ins and outs from others. The cooking classes are, again I can say with 100% accuracy, what these chefs do with their teams. I’ve met some of them and/or their team members well before their names were as prominent to mainstream America. These people are real talents. Natalie Portman’s class is what real studio actors do. Nothing less. You go to work pretending to be someone else. Don’t waste your money on an acting degree. Take this. If you dislike it, it isn’t the career for you. Acting is not close to the high intensity of music or being a professional celebrity chef. Hers is the best acting class and the only one that makes sense. The other acting classes feel like acting taught by a GOOP Summit. Meaningless chatter that teaches you nothing but tries to make you feel good. Unfortunately, I’ve met some of these get rich quick sleaze bags over in the other categories. They’re as bad as they are in person or when anyone I know ever dealt with them. They are people who had good fortune strike them by being in the right place at the right time in history with everything aligning. They aren’t the nice people their fans think they are and are really dishonest about how things get done. Many of these “nice” people of business and other lines of non-music/film work are mean when you meet them and only talk to the powerful famous men beside you for half an hour as you stand there, as those men openly tell them to talk to you and they still ignore you. They are successful because they mistreat everyone and use people, I guess is the real answer I gain, and LUCK. One of the people teaching how to make it business on Masterclass privately had an alleged insider trading issue against him dropped. The film, writing, branding and business coursework all repeat themselves. Finding your voice. Your brand. Lots of I don’t do as I say in real life but this is for you peasants. No real advice how to get financing for your app, your movie, nothing. The Stranger Things creatives’ class section on how to find an agent is not going to help you, and it isn’t how anyone I ever met who deserves success wound up at a top 5 Hollywood agency. It’s setting you up for failure and a hopeless dream. That isn’t how it works. You need to become a top model, a star actor, a working musician, or a Broadway working actor, and slide in from there because you’re not going to stand a chance going by what they say. Sorry, I’m not impressed that Ron Howard suggests to watch YouTube as inspiration and, in unspoken subtext to “borrow” from that. The film classes do not bother to talk about the technical work that real film directors do! Aaron Sorkin is here laughing that he turns in three hour plus screenplays as early drafts and takes forever to finish anything. Lots of his “advice” would get a working C-list studio director blacklisted! Funny how his Masterclass class is wrapped around The American President, a movie disputed with a WGA ruling you can read about online. Please do not listen to him. Learn from wonderful, good people who are working studio directors and screenwriters on social media or YouTube. They’re not as famous, but they are working and earning money; they don’t get free passes to act like irresponsible teenagers at work. One wrong move ruins a career. Remember that. Music is a career you will definitely make it in with hard work and talent. Bring your knowledge. Gain it from Masterclass. Be a pro chef! Start with Masterclass. It’s worth the admission fee for those categories. You will get to dip your toes into the exciting careers that I have witnessed firsthand as people excel. Please don’t take Masterclass for anything else.

Beware the gift that keeps on taking! A couple of years ago we were gifted a masterclass subscription. We were not particularly interested but apparently signed up for a couple of courses that we never viewed. To sign up we had to enter a credit card and for three years were charged $180/year though we never used the service. The charges hit at the first of the year and - our bad - we did not review the cc statements and the charges were included in same statements as our holiday spending. This year we saw the charge, challenged it and Masterclass refunded this year's charge and canceled the auto renewal. Masterclass refused to refund the prior years' charges.

Woke Overload I found a few classes I loved, by people who are top notch at what they do and terrific at teaching it. However just a few. Masterclass is shamelessly "woke" - and I'm saying this as someone who's never been a conservative or voted Republican. MC offers a class on how to succesfully perform womanface (how admirable!), a class from Bill Clinton, and others from luminaries across the corporate media and academic liberal spectrum. Not a single thought leader who has a background or viewpoint that incompatible with predominant woke ideology. The few classes I liked weren't ideological at all, just great teachers.