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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 Arik on Wednesday November 23 2016, @03:24PM
No doubt Leo Fender was a pioneer, but the company that bears his name today is just another big business. They sell a name, they sell advertising, for the most part they buy their instruments cheap from overseas. And guess what? You can easily bypass them and buy from their supplier these days, if that's what you want. And if you're looking for higher quality American made instruments there are lots of smaller companies and independent luthiers to choose from as well.
As to dreams of fame... well if that's your motivation obviously you aren't going to be much of a musician, whether you find it easy to get a guitar or not doesn't matter when you'll never learn to play it.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @03:51PM
EVERY young guitarist is motivated by some small part by the promise of groupies. Either they get a taste or they push onward by a love of music.
This could easily be the story Gibson, or Schecter , or Peavey; but the fact of the matter is once you graduate from your Squire II, musical instruments are over-valued and over-priced- I got a custom guitar built to my specification for far less than any of the premium builds.
And fact of the matter we are moving away from musical literacy. When growing up, every home aspired to a piano. That doesn't happen anymore. Knowing how to construct a chord is as much in the arcane arts as cooking for yourself.
So it goes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @05:21PM
"So it goes."
Tralfamadorian?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @08:56PM
Yes, but not as a 6 billion dollar business.
Same deal with Gibson and Martin, etc. Sort of the same as Budweiser and Miller and company. The mass manufacture instruments are not improving their quality to match their prices anymore. Pretty much every mass-produced guitar you buy today, even the 5000+ dollar 'custom' ones doesn't even come with a free setup (fret level, action adjustment, etc required to ensure a guitar plays in tune.) Hell, many of them don't even have the fret edged smoothed off so they won't cut up your fingers. Yet still hundreds of thousands to millions of people are buying them on brand identity. Nowadays however there is a huge diversity of local instrument builders and relic-ers (some of the relics are crap and cost in the same range as custom shop instruments, with the same or in some cases worse setup issues) producing instruments, either from scratch (aside from tuners and other complicated mechanical parts. Pickups can be bought or built) or from kits (notably Allparts, who sells licensed finished and unfinished reproduction fender bodies for people who don't want to design and/or carve their own.
Much like microbreweries took business away from the national brewers as legal restrictions were lifted from their post-Prohibition levels, so too has guitarmaking become a small business opportunity of bespoke manufacture due in large part to the reduction in tool costs and the improved precision of available tools and design blueprints (for those using or modifying a stock design.)