Are There Too Many Guitars?
By MNJ
| Posted in Writer's Block
Last week I visited a large provincial town in East Anglia to get a computer fixed and upgraded. I didn’t want to hang around for hours while the engineers repeatedly started and restarted my machine, let alone listen to them talking to each other in a language that’s not understood in the outside world. They were also displaying a form of head scratching that would cause concern to a skin specialist, so I took a stroll into town.
It was a Thursday morning so there weren’t many people around. Winding my way through some rather picturesque backstreets leading to the town centre, I started to notice that even on some of the most hidden away spots, there was either a restaurant, bar, pub, wine bar, bistro or some other variety of eating or drinking establishment. In all my travels around the country I can’t remember anywhere else that has as many hostelries packed so numerously into such a relatively small area. As you do when you’re in business yourself, you start to weigh up and mentally analyse just how some of these places survive, either tucked away with little passing trade, or bang next door to a pub in a chain promoting cheap drinks. According to the figures, one in three catering establishments fails in the first two years, so why do perfectly sane people continue to put themselves in harm’s way financially to realise their dreams of owning and running such a business?
Actually, I’ve just answered my own question – it’s their dream. If you shift the analogy to guitars, the same factors apply. There are so many guitars that are made not by the big companies, and not even by the mid-size companies, that are advertised in the guitar magazines and online that cannot possibly sell in enough quantities to sustain a business and all that it costs to run. It would be unfair to name names but next time you’re leafing through a guitar publication, count the number of guitar brands that you’ve never heard of, or seen hanging on a shop wall. You may be surprised at how many there are. Moreover, I wouldn’t have thought many get more than a cursory glance before the reader flips to the page with a review of a shiny new Fender. It’s a sad fact that most of these companies won’t be there next year, having failed to shift any sort of quantity of stock to pay the bills.
My thoughts on these particular companies and the unfortunate people that are left out of pocket and worse at the demise of their businesses are: ‘Why on earth did they bother?’, ‘What made them think that they were going to succeed with such a wacky design?’, and ‘Who on earth is going to buy a guitar that looks like that?’ In my days behind a music shop counter, I would be approached on a monthly basis by a rep or guitar builder eager to get his product in front of the guitar buying public. Some of the most difficult conversations I’ve ever had were with some of these people, who usually went away without an order and probably feeling pretty dejected as they started to realise that their guitars had a slim to zero chance of selling in an already crowded market place dominated by two or three names.
It’s a fact that guitars made to sell are the product of a business. However, there’s an emotional element tied up in the idea that you can build a guitar to a design that has never been seen before, that it’s going to revolutionise guitar construction, or that it’s going to change the world and make you a millionaire. Of course these events rarely happen, and that’s where the dreams end for most people.
The problem is, there are too many guitars. What I really mean is, there are too many guitar manufacturers. I’m not talking about the successful multi-nationals or the very small hand-made guitar companies, but the ones in the middle. Amazingly, new ones appear year after year and they may cause a bit of mild excitement in the industry when their guitars are launched, but after failing to sell enough the company fades into obscurity and then oblivion. There have been literally hundreds down the years.
My opinion on why they fail is that they try too hard to change the world, hoping guitar buyers will come flocking to worship the ‘next big thing’. Even the recent innovation of the self-tuning guitar, a feature that even a few years ago would have been seen as an impossible feat of engineering or an April Fool’s joke, stunning though it is, hasn’t really caused an outbreak of guitar buying hysteria or caused anybody to abandon their tried and trusted instrument.
There are no answers here, and what I say isn’t going to stop anybody designing and building new styles and models of guitars on any level, and nor should it. But I hope anyone venturing out to build guitars that they hope to sell keeps an eye on the accounts as well as the drawing board.
Tags: fender, Guitar, guitar innovation