-
The music industry needs to promote the guitar to the younger generation. This saved the accordion...
Or...I guess not...
In 1955 Americans bought 120,000 accordions (a figure comparable to the sale of all the brass instruments purchased by public schools). By 1958 the total number of accordions sold dropped to 92,000. What must have seemed particularly alarming, especially to music dealers who were members of the National Association of Music Merchants (and would have tracked such information in the Association’s annual reports), was the steady rise in guitar sales: from 250,000 in 1955 to 700,000 in 1963. In 1964 a very bleak year for the accordion world, guitar sales topped one million, and accordion sales dropped down to 50,000, has the figure reported for the console organ. In Castelfidaro, seventeen accordion factories closed down between 1960 and 1963. From “Squeeze This!: A Cultural History of the Accordion in America”
-
03-03-2018 08:25 AM
-
What's needed is a stroke of marketing genius, like this:
-
US overall guitar sales show dollar values, edging back up to 2005 levels, after a 20% downturn in 2009, and for several years after. Meanwhile US population increased from 305 to 324 million, a 6% increase. Not sure if these dollar figures are even inflation-adjusted. Looks like overall industry is treading water at best.
Broadly speaking, I think jazz music continues to struggle. Not too many people left who listened to swing era stuff, or jazz music of 50's, in this country. Barry Harris (born 1929) is kind of emblematic, here.
Lots of similarities with US golf industry. Jazz is pretty much a US invention, and US players dominated in it for a long time. While golf was invented elsewhere, US had far more courses, and expanded through 50's-90's, but is now a declining industry in US.
Future growth will be elsewhere. Right now US PGA Tour is still best competition overall, but is being pushed by other satellite tours elsewhere. (PGA Tour has recognized this and is markedly more international now than 20 yrs. ago. This week's tmt. is in Mexico, for example.)
-
I actually think it’s impossible to draw general conclusions.
The world is full of small scenes and niches, sometimes completely non-local via the Internet.
I don’t think there is a general youth culture now in the same way as there was 30 years ago. I think kids are discovering things ahistorically.
I saw a comment from someone who discovered John Dowland through playing Assassin’s Creed, for instance. Video games and YouTube are actually how many young people are introduced to music.
Young musicians are generally eclectic. Even the young serious jazzers I teach are much into neo soul, hip hop and EDM as they are bebop or Kurt Rosenwinkel.
I can’t wait to see what they come up with!
But they need gear that reflects that eclecticism I think. Guitars that also work as triggers for Ableton, amp modellers that also provide synth sounds, that kind of stuff.
-
Your analysis here rings true for me, but I find one curious point that gives me some hope. Every day I listen to the Jazz Guitar channel on Jazzradio.com. Yes, they have a jazz guitar channel!
Originally Posted by goldenwave77
What amazes me is how time after time, I'll hear some fantastic track and think "WHO IS THAT?" and look at the screen and it's a totally new name. I imagine there are 20 or so jazz guitarists getting pretty regular play on that channel who are completely new at least to me.
I don't know if they're making it financially or not. I don't know much about them, but I'm still impressed that for a discipline in decline, there sure seem to be a lot of young, super-talented exponents of the Jazz guitar in its classic and contemporary form. On top of that, publishers seem to think there is a market for more and more jazz guitar books. When I started out, finding a book of standards set up for solo guitar was hard. Now, choosing the one I want to use is hard. There must be a market for these books, which implies there are people out there at the intermediate level who want to play standards in this style. Last, we have so many fine luthiers hand-crafting guitars at the moderately-high to high end, and somehow they seem to be making it. Ibanez seems to think investing in a low-end and moderately priced range of arch-tops evocative of the classic jazz vibe is a good marketing move.
I don't know what these observations actually mean. Are all these guitarists I'm hearing and admiring, whose CDs I'm finding and buying, or purchasing their tracks for download... moonlighting at fast-food restaurants to survive? Are these books being published just going immediately to remainder stores? Is the market for both high-end hand made archtops and low/medium price range Ibanez archtops in illusion?
I'm stuck. I don't know what's happening. But (a) I love hearing all this fresh talent (b) I love the choice of learning materials available to me as a hobby-hack player and (c) I love going to church and having the millennial worship leader walk out playing a Loar LH309 straight into a Fender Twin Reverb.
Something's happening here. Somewhere here there is a coherent market. Can Gibson and Heritage figure it out and make a good move?
-
Agree with Lawson. Internet is a great platform for up and coming talent, it is also a good source of incom for the well known professionals who can give you an insight into their thinking if you choose to be a patreon, they don,t earn enough from gigging, then do it online.
All the questions we are asking, guitar sales, market projection, future buyers, Henry probably asked the same and got the answers many years ago, started the ball rolling by diversifying into other areas as a back-up when it came to this point in the guitar,s low demand.
It is a pity that his projections did not work out .
-
Hey, Pete Cetera’s main instrument was the accordian. Most of his bass chops he learned from Terry Kath after joining CTA. Originally Posted by icr
now, back to our discussion as to why kids don’t like grandpa’s accordian. Strike that, guitar.
-
Christian,
These are excellent points. I work with university students in a music interest group. These folks are all musicians. They are eclectic as heck...jazz to EDM, for sure. They _will_ devise new art forms.
GT
-
Thanks Greennote.
We need a Jim Marshall and Les Paul for THIS generation.... Adam Neely (practically the YouTube poster boy for this new music) makes the point that most music companies are living 10 years in the past.... Guitar companies are mostly interested in recreating vintage sounds...
And lest we forget Les Paul and Marshall both knew first hand what they and their colleagues wanted, instead of trying to impose technological advancements 'top down.' The players know what the players want.
-
Let us not forget this question: What do listeners want? Originally Posted by christianm77
-
Lawson, and others....I hope you're right.
Maybe there's more vitality to the music scene than (I) we think, based on numerous decentralized players (and internet) that just don't use centralized major media exposure, under the older distribution model. The 9/10th's of the iceberg under the surface.
Lord knows...record companies were not known for playing it straight with artists.
-
I dunno. They can take it or leave it. Originally Posted by citizenk74
For me, I aim to make music that I would like to listen to. That's my guiding principle. Hopefully it stops me from going too far down the self-indulgence rabbit hole.... But I can't imagine catering for some constituency of 'listeners.' That way lies inaction and self-doubt.
OTOH there can be no expectation that anyone else will necessarily like the result. That music does make a connection to others is an amazing thing.
How this expresses itself in the world of gear, no idea. TBH, the gear a musician uses is less important to me than most other things when listening to music. I don't really care what type of cello Yo-Yo-Ma plays or what type of a mouthpiece Chris Potter uses, the important thing is that it fulfils their needs so they can make music freely.
-
I'm just thinking through what seems to be contradictory "data." We know the apparent decline of the guitar, and we observe that it's hard to get gigs playing jazz standards in the classic jazz guitar vein. Bad news. On the other hand, yeah, there are all these little-known artists who seem to be getting some run, there is evidently a good market for traditional jazz guitar styled-standard arrangements, boutique luthiers seem to be making a go of it, and Epihone and Ibanez seem to be selling low-end archtops. Originally Posted by goldenwave77
I don't really know what to make of it, but maybe there is some kind of reshuffling of the venues and resources going on here. I'd like to believe my more hopeful observations are "leading edge" trends.
-
"I aim to make music that I would like to listen to." We're definitely on the same page here. As to "catering for some constituency of 'listeners,' I didn't mean to suggest that extremity, for in that direction lies "Free Bird." I simply meant that whatever is played in the presence of The Public (bless 'em!) must engage their wants and needs on some level sufficient to get them to buy our t-shirts or travel mugs or whatever - CDs, even! Because otherwise, being a musician gets to be an expensive Public Service Initiative - a noble effort, to be sure, but every so often, Baby needs a new pair of shoes. Originally Posted by christianm77
-
I am a survivor of the Accordion Child Phenom, imagine in 1958 walking past all the new electric guitars hanging in the store to where you learned to do polkas on a god damn accordion...
-
100% - otherwise, probably should find a different line of work lol... Originally Posted by citizenk74
-
My first instrument was the accordion, when I was a little kid in the 1960’s. When my relatives would all gather for Christmas celebrations at our house, and as the night wore on, and maybe folks drank a little too much, my mother would summon me to play my accordion. And my uncles would say you know, it’s getting late, we got a long drive ... never failed to clear the room. God I couldn’t wait to start playing guitar! Originally Posted by BigMikeinNJ
-
At least you got an accordion. I got dance lessons. Foxtrot, Waltz and a new dance called the "Twist". Originally Posted by BigMikeinNJ
-
I had piano lessons from Mrs. Lewis. Mrs. Lewis had a two pronged pedagogy. One was a wooden ruler with which she whacked my hand every time I made a mistake. Prong Two was a book entitled "Teaching Little Fingers to Play." I always wanted to add to that title "Until No Little Fingers Are Left."
My mother forced me to do piano lessons a year, then thank God, she divorced my dad, the court gave me to my dad (strange for 1965) and I started guitar because I knew nothing would aggravate my mother more than for me to play guitar. She'd take a draw on her pipe (YES, she smoked a pipe!) and say "Yeah, you play that GEE-TAHR and all you'll do is strum honky tonk music in a whore-house somewhere."
Well... I did end up teaching in a seminary... hmmmm
-
Shows what she knew - I bet some (most) of us would love some honky tonk gigs in whore houses. Originally Posted by lawson-stone
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
-
An old joke among us used to be "Don't tell my mama I'm a helicopter pilot in the Gulf of Mexico. She thinks I'm a piano player in a whorehouse."
-
Sad times indeed. But not the first time Gibson has been on the ropes. Hopefully they pull out of this with their head finally screwed on straight. I mean..... I'm sorry but when I go to my local Gibson dealer and see a 59 reissue selling "on sale" for $7500 Canadian you've pretty much priced yourself out of reality.
When I started playing it was all about Gibson for me. I loved them. Still do. But they've become unrealistic. I just saw a 1959? L-5 at a local store going for $18,500. I'm sorry.....I don't care how nice this thing is. I'm not paying almost 20 grand because it says Gibson on it.
My most recent purchase was a 2015 Epiphone Riviera P-93 in wine red. The fit and finish on this thing is gorgeous. I've had it for over a year. The workmanship on this thing is better (sorry but it's true) than a LOT of newer Gibson's that I've seen. I paid $800 cdn with a hardshell tax in. Now..... it wasn't perfect but what guitar is out of the box? I brought it to a fantastic local shop and got a fret dress and had the nut lowered (from the factory the nut height was ridiculous)..... this guitar is now possibly the nicest playing thinline I've ever owned. The work I had done ran me $260. So for under $1100 I have a guitar that looks better (IMHO) than any new 335 I've seen and plays like an absoute dream...... and you want me to pay almost 4 grand for a 335 with 4mm action and finish flaws all over it just because you stamped Gibson on it? No thank you.
What Gibson needs to do is get back to making quality guitars at a "reasonable" price. Maybe then I'll buy one. Until then? With a little work and a little extra money invested... I'll take the Epi. Sure it's poly and not nitro...... do I care? Not one bit.
-
...and music that would make a vulture retch. Let's not forget that. Originally Posted by christianm77
-
I agree but I'll throw my 2 cents into the ring anyway. Originally Posted by christianm77
One thing that seems different in our world today versus, say, the hey day of the electric guitar when every kid wanted one is the vast landscape of career choices that are relatively new, and sometimes fraught with degrees of uncertainties. Computers and automation (and now politics) have occupied young peoples' lives unlike anything previous. The world is a much more distracting place not just because of the entertainment available on a smart phone, but also because career choices are not as clear cut as they used to be. It isn't as settling as, maybe, the post WWII era when we could just produce by means of doing mostly what we had been dong since the Industrial Revolution only at higher rates. Many careers had already been defined. In present times how enticing is it for younger people to concentrate on something as esoteric as guitar playing when 1) They feel the doom of future uncertainties and can't "Stop and smell the roses" and 2) They have shortcuts to utilize their creative processes that don't involve as much commitment as guitar playing?
I think back on my own life. When my older brother was in a band I was a young teenager. Even though I had a few years of piano lessons behind me, the best I could do was play the tambourine for them because they were nice enough to include me. (My older brother was the keyboardist, btw.) It was a few years later when I realized that I would be going to college and picking a major (in my case, architecture) that I got into guitar playing. It was almost as if a weight was lifted off of me because I had made some life decisions that allowed me to better compartmentalize my efforts and passions.
Again, my 2 cents. If this relates to anything about the guitar industry today I would just summarize as to say that there is probably a static point of stability based on the fact that only so many people can actually concentrate on passions when the levels of chaos in everyday life exist as they do now.Last edited by lammie200; 03-04-2018 at 06:27 PM.
-
I think that's a really pertinent observation.
Reply With Quote
Recommandations for Hollowbodies for $600 and under?
Today, 05:20 AM in Guitar, Amps & Gizmos