Howard Klepper once said here on the OLF that he started playing guitar to get all the babes and it didn't work....
These days the demographic that is the vast majority of our guitar repair clients are 55 - 65 year old white males. They didn't get the memo about the babes and by the way, what's a memo...
During the pandemic more guitars were sold new than ever before in human history so there is interest in the playing side.
But who's buying those guitars, 55 - 65 year old white men are and that has been concerning to me for a long time. I'll add there was significant inflation in new guitar prices during the last five years. My Collings I35 that I paid $4,600 new for is now going for $7,500 for the exact same guitar.
Dave tells me that it won't matter to us we are brick and mortar, very established and turn away 60% of the work that comes our way. But I would not want to be just starting out these days and we did see 5 - 6 competing shops in our area all fail usually in 18 months or so.
On the OLF index page there is a field for "our latest member" or something like that. It's been the same person for months suggesting no new membership here for months. It could be that it needs to be manually updated but I always thought that this field was automatically populated.
My own belief and observation is that the "Golden Age Of Lutherie" was around 2005 - 2008ish and the forum had new members nearly every day back then. We had a couple dozen, real deal professional Luthiers who interacted here with reckless abandon... Most left and I did survey them and know why they left but that's a different discussion.
What may be a very relevant question is what is the interest in woodworking these days? Most of you came here from there. I was never a woodworker and the only thing I ever made before my first guitar were reservations.
I also don't think that the passing... of LMI can be attributed to the size of the market. We don't know what it looked like for them or why. StewMac is seemingly ever expanding like the Borg.... and as mentioned there are others now too with an Amazon presence that can have my new electric guitar knob puller in my hands 12 hours after I ordered it.
Overhead for brick and mortar businesses can be a killer. We shed 2/3rds of our overhead when we moved out of the People's Republic of Ann Arbor into the woods of Michigan. We love our new digs too.
Our business is booming, most ever experienced by us and guitar sales remain way up but it is who buys them that concerns me the most. Younger folks are off with their iPads and not learning to play guitars like my generation did. Maybe you can get more babes with an iPad....
