How it used to be.
Compared to today.
When I started teaching guitar lessons in early 1996, I was charging around $20-25/hour to go over to nearby neighbors in my apartment complex or over to a friends house to show them how to play the guitar. At the time, I was working a part time job at the airport. Instructing guitar lessons was nothing more than a way for me to make some easy extra cash on my days off. Then one day, that part time job lost its contract, and I had to find another way to make an income. My buddy, Mike suggested I start teaching at the local music store with him. By early 1997, I had a roster of around 20+ weekly students at the local music store. These were the official beginning days of my music teaching career. I just sort of fell into it out of necessity. It wasn't anything I had ever planned. It was simply time for me to change the path that I was walking.
Back in those days, if you were someone who was interested in learning how to play the guitar, you had to make an effort to drive to the local music store, look around and try a few guitars, then talk with a sales representative about the purchase of the right guitar for you. You might even ask about taking lessons to learn how to play that new guitar. The sales representative would then give you information on the teachers available in the store.
I was proactive in getting to know the staff at the music store. I wanted them to sell me (as a guitar teacher), to any prospective new students. During the weekdays, there was only two instructors - me and one other older guitar teacher. Prospective students had a choice as to which teacher they wanted. We eventually had four guitar teachers during the week. The manager of the store, Tracy designed and printed off pictures and short bios of all of the teachers, then posted them in various places around the store. Back then, music stores usually had a bulletin board near the front of the store for customers to peruse. I designed and posted my own bio; and I even got business cards printed. I was quite resourceful - and it was slowly paying off.
You see, in the middle 1990's, very few people had home computers. Almost nobody had a cell phone. Both the internet and cell phone technology were still very much in their infancy stages. Buying guitars or finding guitar teachers was not done online like it is now. You had to make a trip to the music store for this. Nobody had their own websites back then. The advent of social media was still another decade away. Teachers got new students by word-of-mouth advertising and simple printed flyers and business cards. This was how we did it.
Honestly, I can sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo. I never had any problem selling myself to prospective students, especially when we spoke face-to-face in the music store. I got a lot of this training when I worked as a skycap at the airport. You see, skycaps have to quickly learn how to hustle for tips. After doing that for several years, it gave me the confidence to be able to talk with people.
I wasn't always busy with a full roster of students. No, quite the contrary. My busiest days might have six students. I hated driving all the way across town just to see one or two students. It seemed like such a waste of valuable time. This was when I started scheduling "in house" lessons in the homes of my students. My entire objective was to keep busy and put in an honest eight-hour day, just like everyone else.
I was one of the few people back then, who did carry my own cell phone. These phones served one purpose - to make and receive phone calls. Smartphones were still several years away. I finally got a computer in 1999. This was when things slowly began to change. The internet seemed like the perfect, ideal way to advertise my guitar lessons on a much larger scale. You've got to remember that back then, people didn't just build their own websites. Build-your-own website platforms like Wix or Duda didn't even exist yet. Instead of having my own website, I applied to various music teaching websites. This seemed to work for a while.
The music store was bought out by a big chain corporation. They brought in new management and people who only had one job to do - and that was to get rid of the employees who were costing the company money. Well, none of the teachers were actual employees of the music store. We were just there to utilize the location and the space in the back rooms that weren't being used, to help bring in hundreds of students into the store by default. This was good for the music store as they made lots of money on our students. The new owners didn't see it that way and subsequently decided to boot all of us out of the store. For the next several years, the only way I got any new students was word-of-mouth or websites I had been listed on. It worked for a while, but I needed much more control of the online advertising.
One afternoon in 2009, I was watching TV, and I saw a commercial about a free trial on how to build your own website. So, I did it. I built my own website. I had a lot to learn about creating a website that would actually work. I made a lot of mistakes in buying into advertising on Google. The cost to do that was way out of my meager budget. I did my research, learned about "keywords" and website designs that were more attractive to online window shoppers. Again, it worked for a while, but I simply couldn't compete with the national schools or the dozens of other guitar teachers in town doing the same thing I was.
The internet had begun to take away the one-on-one, face-to-face interaction that used to work so well. Fewer people were going to music stores to buy a guitar or to take lessons. YouTube came along in February 2005, which prompted an entire new generation of would-be guitarists into learning how to play their guitar by watching videos. Why pay for formal lessons when you can learn how to play the guitar for free online? This was not a good sign. A few years later, smartphones, Facebook and social media became the revolution that would change everything forever.
Imagine the battle of your typical independent music instructor. If you don't teach music in a school, you probably struggle everyday. Many of the musicians I knew who taught lessons during the day, struggled just as badly as I did. Many of them eventually gave up and got real jobs. Even I was forced into getting a job in 2017. It got so bad that I had to walk away from teaching for a few years just to work a menial, tedious minimum wage job, so I could pay my bills.
How did things get so bad?
In the past twenty-plus years, the music industry all but disappeared completely, and musicians had to learn how to adapt to new changes. The internet prompted the digitizing and piracy of music through online file-sharing software programs. Imagine an entire generation of people under the age of 30 who have never walked into a vinyl or CD music store to purchase an album. All they have ever known their entire existence is to buy (or steal) music online, or subscribe to a streaming service. They don't even listen to full-length albums. They listen to playlists. Most of them don't even know what they are listening to or why they are listening to it. This is an alarming proposition.
Somehow, in the past twenty-some-odd years, mainstream music has become victim to cookie-cutter production. There are almost no new real rock stars with shredding capabilities like Eddie or Jimmy or Stevie or Alex. By the way, what happened to the guitar solo's in rock music? Where did they go? It's almost as if most mainstream music has become completely "dumbified". You no longer need to know basic music theory or technique in learning how to play your instrument. All you need to know is how to play four chords and how to use a capo on your guitar.
Today's music just can't be "it". It's all just temporary. As big as Taylor Swift is now, she will one day lose her insane popularity by someone younger and better. She's already showing signs of changes in her life. My gut tells me that this is a generational thing that will one day absorb itself into the music consciousness of the world and something else, something much better will hopefully come along. In the meantime, we wait. Everything can be done on the computer now. Don't get me started on what's coming with artificial intelligence in music. A.I. could very-well be the proverbial nail in the coffin for modern "human created" music.
I feel strongly that what I teach as a guitar instructor has been dying a slow death for many years. My best students are the people who remember life before the internet, smart phones and social media. It is a genuine struggle to teach the younger generations of kids who know almost nothing of the world of music before the internet. I do however, have a select few of my younger students who do "get it". They know that the good stuff was created decades before they were born - and they want to learn how to play it.
Creativity is a human quality. Art in every form comes from the mind of an individual who has dedicated their entire life to the pursuit of limitless creativity. Music is what we all need. Imagine a world without it. Music is a way that humans communicate and convey emotions, feelings, thoughts and knowledge by reaching our soul, and by touching us and giving us goosebumps.
Music helps us all get through the day. We dance to it, we sing to it and we play to it. To sit around a campfire or on the back porch and play songs on your guitar for friends and family, is why we all pick up the guitar in the first place. We learn a few chords, learn a few songs and enjoy the organic art of music unplugged.
I do have hope for the musicians of tomorrow. There are many of them out there who have created a whole new level of musicianship that was once difficult to even imagine as being humanly possible. These are young people who have learned the art of becoming musicians of extraordinary capacities. Maybe they will keep the torch burning for a few more decades. One can only dream.