Coming off the worst year any of us can remember, with unit sales of new pianos plummeting and dealerships closing, we may be standing at the precipice of the end of the modern piano dealer. Soon, like the home organ dealer before us, we could be reduced to just a few niche-market specialty stores. Many of us remember when new piano sales were measured in the hundreds of thousands per year. How did we get to the low tens of thousands? It’s time to take a good, hard look at what went wrong and what we can do about it.
IT’S NOT THE ECONOMY!
Steve Thomas, president of Scott’s Music in Grand Forks, N.D., pointed out that the miserable economy is a temporary factor, at most, in the piano industry’s decline. “The economy is the least of our problems,” he said. “The decline in piano sales started while the economy was still booming. It is directly linked to a decline in the perceived value of music education among this generation. And many who are interested [in learning music] have been siphoned off by big-box retailers, often with products from our own suppliers.” Certainly the demise of the housing market is a factor, but the housing crash may be as coincidental as it was causal. Through most of the 20th century, it was nearly impossible to get a mortgage for more than four times your annual income without at least 10-percent down or with a payment exceeding one week’s pay. By 1990, the rules were rewritten. In the most extreme cases, buyers financed homes they weren’t going to live in with lenders who weren’t going to hold the paper. Can anyone be surprised that the bubble burst?
