I don’t for any minute think that the music industry had an easy ride after Covid. There was a huge boom for those who were able to trade online while the shops were closed. But then we had a real slump where there were oversupply issues and probably a false sense of what the demand was likely to be post-pandemic.
But I don’t fundamentally put that down as the reason why we lost a couple of the bigger retailers in 2025. I think you have to lay the majority of that at the door of consumer shopping habits changing, and retailers not responding to those changes. I feel like that is ultimately the reason any retailer fails in the end.
Because if you take a big American brand that might have 1,000 SKUs in the catalog – and I’m not even going into the accessories, I’m just talking guitars, amps, and pedals – consumers can tap onto a website and find any one of those 1,000 guitars in a five-minute session.
They’ll choose which one they want. And if the next step is to go to their local retailer and say, ‘I’ve found this guitar, I’m interested’, and that retailer goes, ‘Sorry, we haven’t got that’ – which is absolutely what will happen, nine times out of 10, in a small retailer – then the consumer will say, ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll get it somewhere else.’
In fact, the one thing that’s making it very hard in the industry – at whatever level – is that there’s just too much choice. The customer has such overwhelming choice that it’s very hard to make sure you’ve got the thing they want.
And it’s greed economics: the big brands demand growth every year, and the only way they get growth is to go, ‘Oh, well, we’re famous for making this particular model, but that’s not enough any more, so we need something that looks a bit pointy or jazzy or whatever.’
If I was a small-to-medium-sized retailer now, I would be making sure that my catalog offering was all deliverable within 24 hours
Everybody is trying to make everything. And the reality is that we’re all doomed to failure then because there’s just not enough customers to buy everything that every brand makes. I wish it would go back to when brands were brilliant at doing one thing and just do that. But that’s fantasy economics. You know, big American corporations and investors want growth – and growth will come at a cost, ultimately.
If I was a small-to-medium-sized retailer now, I would be making sure that my catalog offering was all deliverable within 24 hours. And as a consequence, I would just think, ‘I’m not going to be a retailer for a big American manufacturer because I’m just going to be telling my customers 90 percent of the time that I haven’t got what they want.’
I’d decide that I’m going to become hyper-niche, and maybe do secondhand or vintage or esoteric brands really well, and I’ll accept that, actually, I won’t appeal to most guitar players. But at least I’ll be good at that one thing I’ve decided to do – as opposed to bad at a lot of things.
From what I’m hearing, the business out there is not as bad as people perceive. I’m seeing what I think is a lot of largely misleading press, like, ‘The problem is that no-one wants to buy guitars any more, no-one wants to play music any more.’ But what I’m hearing from most of my suppliers is that the business in 2025 isn’t that different from 2024.
By the way, this is off the back of Andertons having its best year ever. So I don’t think there is this massive doom and gloom story out there for the music industry; I just think it’s changing habits and changing expectations. And some brands are doing a good job of adjusting their offering to appeal to those customers – and some brands aren’t.
- This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.
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