My, but how times can change.
Watching the art of music disappear.
I remain cautiously optimistic, yet dubious at the same time about where music is going. Is the art of music is slowly disappearing? Is it too late to fix it?
1996
I started teaching guitar lessons at the Thoroughbred music store on Lee road in Orlando, in 1996. Before too long, I began teaching lessons in the homes of my students. I charged a little more for the convenience, and they were happy to pay for it. At the time, people who did not want to take lessons at the music store, often called the music store for information about their teachers. This was how I got my in-house students. I even got a cell phone, so I could get calls directly from inquiring students while I was at the music store. Other times, I relied on "word-of-mouth" advertising. People came into the store, looked at guitars, talked with the sales guys and asked about lessons. There was also a huge bulletin board next to the front door. I had a flyer posted on that bulletin board. The manager of the store even made flyer copies of all of the teachers at the store and posted them on all of the walls, so people could see them as they walked around the store. For three years, this was how I got work.
1999
In 1999, I got my first home computer. I got online for the first time, on March 7th. Remember dial-up internet? The very idea of me having my own website, was way beyond my scope of understanding. I knew nothing about computers or the internet, much less anything about having my own website. The ex-wife of an old friend offered to build one for me for free, as an experiment for her business. It didn't cost me anything, and whether or not it even worked is irrelevant. One day, I decided to expand my reach to try to find websites that had music teachers on them who could sign up for free. I found one website (I cannot remember the name), and I signed up. Within a few days, I was getting calls from all over town. This was pretty cool! Now, I can just sit back and wait for everyone to contact me. Well, it was simply a matter of time before that proverbial cash cow would begin to lose its momentum.
2000
I think Sam Ash bought-out Thoroughbred around 2000. Within a year, new management of that store asked all of the teachers to leave because we were not employees of the store, and we were not insured; and because Sam Ash did not provide in store lessons in their nationwide system. I ended up teaching a couple years at my buddies church, in one of the rooms they used for Sunday school. I eventually only went over there one or two days out of the week. I no longer had access to meeting a flow of prospective new students like I did at the music store. I had to learn to hustle and find students on my own…but where?
2005
In 2005, I started teaching lessons at "All About Music", which just so happened to be located two doors down from the Sam Ash store that kicked out all of their teachers three or four years earlier. The owner of this new place opened a new location on the east side of town, closer to me. He blew smoke up everybody's skirt about how his business was going to boom and how he was going to expand to places across the country. He even made me the head director for guitar lessons at the new store. Well, talk is cheap. The onslaught of new students we were promised, never happened. I only had a handful of students at that store. I stuck around and waited. All About Music never actually caught on. Things got much worse by that summer. One afternoon, I walked in to begin my day of lessons when the manager of the store told me that the owner did not have our paychecks. As we dug a little deeper into this, we found out that the owner took off with our payroll for the past two weeks. He had been using the store as a front to sell drugs. At least, this was what I was told. I immediately contacted all of my students and their parents and told them not to come to the store. It was then and there that I decided that I would no longer teach at a music store. I never did get my two weeks pay.
The advent of Social Media and the Smartphone.
So, all of that was happening 20 years ago. It was a very different time back then. in 2004-05, social media didn't even exist yet. MySpace was really the only social media platform anyone knew about. I continued to try to find online websites for music teachers, only to find that most of them were no longer free for teachers. Sometime around June 2007, the first iPhone was brought to the public as the first smartphone to revolutionize the world. This was the beginning of social media. However, in many ways, I missed the starting gun on this. I got onto YouTube and tried to do video lessons, but I was far too late to make a dent.
2009
By 2009, I needed to change the way I marketed myself. I was home one afternoon, watching TV. I saw a commercial for Intuit Websites. “Build your own website and pay only $20/month”. So, with necessity being the mother of invention, I learned how to build websites. It eventually started to bring in new business, but again, the internet was so saturated with guitar lessons websites that I was the proverbial haystack in a needle factory. Then something else started to happen. National music schools with deep pockets for advertising began to monopolize the internet.
If you wanted to be seen on the first page of a Google search, you had to have a near perfect website and a lot of money to invest into Adwords marketing on Google. I had neither, but I kept at it. I learned about SEO (search engine optimization), and how to create a website that Google likes, which would ultimately push it to the first page organically without me investing a lot of money in advertising. I discovered that it was all about simplicity and "keywords".
However, the problem of all of these national schools, still remained. No matter what I did, I could not be seen on page one unless you scrolled way down passed all of the sponsored advertising. It was a rigged game, and I was quickly losing. I eventually lost it all. I had almost no weekly students. I couldn't fight the big boys anymore. I even tried signing up as a teacher on their websites, but they didn't pay anywhere close to what I was making on my own for in-house lessons. So, in 2017, I walked away from teaching guitar for the first time in 21 years. I had been beaten.
2020
My, but how times can change. Between 2017 and 2021, I worked a job. I ended up in the hospital and almost died. I tried to go back to that job, then the plandemic hit. In 2020, the word was forever changed by a virus. Millions of people lost their jobs overnight. By 2021, I had to leave that job because of the incredible stress I was dealing with both physically and mentally.
So, I went back to teaching guitar lessons. It was the one thing I knew that I could control in my life. I rebuilt an old website and updated it online. The national schools were still there, but not nearly as ubiquitous as they were only a few years earlier. What happened? Where did they go? Well, it seems that not only did the plandemic destroy the lives and businesses of so many people in the real world, it destroyed a lot of businesses online as well.
In the past three years, there has been a noticeable, rapid decline of people interested in learning how to play musical instrument. There are many reasons for this, but there doesn't seem to be any real answers on how to fix it. It's bad enough that even music stores are closing. Nobody wants to take music lessons. Anyone who is playing music, now purchases all of their gear online through places like Sweetwater and Musician's Friend. Why go to a music store when you can have a guitar you've never played before, delivered right to your front door? I must admit that it is far more convenient for me to buy my guitar strings and picks through Amazon. Is this the reason why local music stores are closing their doors or is it just the simple fact that many of the old marketing strategies of brick and mortar stores no longer work in today's world? Look at how many stores have closed their doors because they missed the starting gun in preparation for the digital revolution: Radio Shack, Circuit City and most recently - Sam Ash.
Today
I received an email this morning from "Take Lessons". They are discontinuing their website by the end of 2024. Is this the beginning of all of the national schools disappearing? I don’t think so. Maybe? There are still quite a few small local schools, barely hanging on. I tried to find work at many of these smaller schools around town, but nobody's hiring guitar teachers. I really don't get it. Why the guitar? Why doesn't anyone want to learn how to play the guitar anymore? Well, for me, it's an easy answer. I blame the music of today. I blame the disappearance of the music industry twenty years ago. You see, the music industry believed that the digital revolution and the invention of file-sharing programs (like Napster) where millions of people could steal free music, was simply a passing fad - nothing to be concerned about. Well, they were terribly wrong in their assumptions. By the time they could do anything, the damage had been done and it was too late to fix it.
Today's music doesn't have guitar heroes or piano heroes or drum heroes. Musicians everywhere are walking away from music just so they can find a job that pays them enough to live. It is absolutely heartbreaking to live in this time as a musician. People who are artists and painters, musicians, writers, photographers are all facing the inevitable decline of their arts. If it can be digitized, it can be stolen. I haven't started a new guitar student in over four months. This is both demoralizing and devastating. How bad will it get? Will it ever get better?
I choose to write on Substack so that I might reach some form of an audience. I love to write about what I know; and for some strange reason, there are people out there who want to read what I have to say. That just blows my mind!
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Dave