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from the while-my-guitar-gently-weeps dept.
Each holiday season, thousands of teenagers tear gift wrap off shiny, new guitars. They giddily pluck at the detuned strings, thinking how cool they'll be once they're rock stars—even if almost all will give up before they ever get to jam out to "Sweet Child o' Mine."
For them, it's no big deal to relegate the guitar to the back of the closet forever in favor of the Playstation controller. But it is a big deal for Fender Musical Instruments Corp., the 70-year-old maker of rock 'n' roll's most iconic electric guitars. Every quitter hurts.
[...]The $6 billion U.S. retail market for musical instruments has been stagnant for five years, according to data compiled by research firm IBISWorld, and would-be guitar buyers have more to distract them than ever. So how do you convince someone to put down the iPhone, pick up a Stratocaster, and keep playing?
Seems Fender didn't get the memo: the music of the future is hip-hop and autotuners.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DECbot on Wednesday November 23 2016, @02:50PM
The same happened to brass instruments when Big Band fell out of favor and to orchestral instruments when classical gave way to brass band. Now music is evolving to computer produced and there is no merit to a live instrumental performance. We all recall a time when it was shameful to performing to a soundtrack... but not so with the new stuff coming from the big studios. I just wish there were more bands like this [youtube.com] coming to the States.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Wednesday November 23 2016, @06:28PM
I picked up an electric guitar earlier this year and have been making headway with it, though I haven't played in a couple weeks because I'm in the middle of a move. Played some on an accoustic back in college and brass instruments before that.
I'm not great yet, but my biggest problem is finding people I want to play with. Everyone I know that does play plays radically different types of music, and it's very hard to find a drummer. I probably have what it takes to start a one-man ska band, but ska is dead, and it'd be tricky to play the guitar and a trumpet at the same time. On the "made it" scene, fewer and fewer bands tour anymore, and when they do, it's typically just along a single coast, maybe both. European tours appear to also be a pretty common thing, but that doesn't do much for me. Maybe it's just that music is dead, at least, in the US.
At any rate, I play for myself, and that's good enough for now.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!