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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: 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.)