RIP Sam Ash. All stores closing

[wankerness]

I have to wonder if this is more based on a lack of people taking up the hobby of music making than online store competition and such. I don't know about you all but for me I live in Brooklyn NY and it's been virtually impossible these past few years to find musicians to play with and start a project with. Here in my neighborhood all the local bands are guys in their 60's playing the same old cover songs.

I mean, how does Guitar Center in Times Square close down?? I'm just not seeing any young or middle age musicians out there anymore. I used to put up a Musician classified Craigslist ad and get a ton of responses, not anymore, dead silence. Same for trying to sell used gear. I suppose some of the price increases might also have something to do with it. I mean tube amps nowadays have gone from the $1800-$2000 range up into the $3300 range, and that's just for a head - no cab. Guitars also used to be around $800 on average for a decent axe and now it's $1700.

But I dunno, I wonder if it's just less people buying the stuff these days.

It's less people buying guitars, flat-out. It's hard to say what the cause is, but it's definitely a thing. I mean, when I was in high school from 1998-2002, out of a class of like 150 students, we had like 4 different garage bands playing crappy hard rock/metal covers, and other classes had bands in them, too. These days it's a shocker if there's one band in the entire school. I've heard people speculate it's cause of social media making it so people are way more petrified to "put themselves out there" since anything they do will immediately be immortalized in video, but I think it's more just that rock music has not been popular in the mainstream sense since the early 00s. Like, you just don't see rock bands selling out big venues anymore unless they're a band that's been around since the early 00s if not earlier (Foo Fighters, Metallica, etc), and then most of the fans are old dudes. The only local rock bands you see anymore around here anyway are a bunch of over the hill dads who have day jobs. Some zoomers like bands like My Chemical Romance cause they liked them when they were 10 or whatever, but they don't seem to be much interested in actual new music.

And the impossibility of making enough money as a rock musician to even be able to like, afford health insurance in this country means it's no longer viable as a dream job for anyone.

Certainly plenty of zoomers listen to classic rock and stuff but only the real weirdos show any interest in actually learning how to play guitar, and they usually can't find anyone else that shares those interests to make a band with. The handful of weird high schoolers I've heard of the last several years (I have multiple music educators in my family and friends) have mostly been the type to just do everything themselves on their computer, either with a midi keyboard or just mouse/keyboard entry. We're just in a dark age for rock guitar.

Band programs have been suffering since Covid, but other than that I don't think there's a big change in the number of kids who take up instruments like that. They just aren't doing guitar or doing it purely as a hobby.

 

[grrr_me_scary]

I have not shopped at a Sam Ash in years but I have received some gift cards for XMAS, birthdays, ....... so I should probably start looking for them before they are worthless.

The same happened when some stores out here called Frye's had closed down (the gift cards ended up being tossed).

I'll let my brother-in-law know as well since he is always buying stuff at Sam Ash (maybe he will find something cool hugely discounted there before they completely close).

 

[DashingGoodlooks]

Anyone been to their local store to see what the clearance deals are like? Looks like most things are still listed at regular price online.

 

[ElysianGuitars]

I stopped by the Cleveland store when this was announced and the best I saw for discount for stuff I was interested in was 10%, not that great. Store was pretty depressing too. I did see this bass though, if it were 5 string it would have come home with me:

 

[DrewH]

Anyone been to their local store to see what the clearance deals are like? Looks like most things are still listed at regular price online.

You won't see the good deals until they are further into the sale which is how these things work. Not just going to drop their drawers right away. But, they'll get desperate as closing nears and then the great deals will come.

It was a matter of when for Sam Ash. In an age where web sales are king, they had a web site that makes Guitar Centers look good. Just a company that never evolved with the times.

 

[DashingGoodlooks]

Yeah, I figured they wouldn't have deep discounts yet but thought they might be better than the 10% you can get pretty much all the time. The few times I've stopped by the one near me they didn't really have anything that interested me - other than Fender/Gibson stuff they pretty much only had entry level models in store, not even any LTD 1000 series or equivalent tiers from other brands.

 

[bostjan]

I'm pretty sure a ton of people predicted this would happen this year.

GC is not doing so hot, either. I won't be too surprised if they're next.

It's not JUST because of online sales, because manufacturers of guitars are taking a bit of an economic beating as well. It's a combination of a lot of things deadly to an industry: young people don't have very much interest in playing, old people don't have as much interest in buying new, the market is glutted with cheap crap no one wants to play, prices are getting out of control making buying even less appealing... etc.

Back in, say 1994, if you wanted to start out, you could get a nice Squier or Ibanez Rg350 or Washburn MG24 or any one of a hundred other brands that made affordable stuff that was decent quality, and you could buy it off a week's salary working at McD's. By then, your more "bad" guitars, like Magnum and Teisco and such, were already over with. So, odds of buying a guitar that would end up ruining your motivation were relatively low.

Now, your nice Squiers cost 5x as much, cheap Ibanezes are much chinsier, and the mid-tier stuff is way more expensive, and a lot of the other decent manufacturers in that bracket folded. There's a ton of horseshit coming from China or wherever and the brand names change every week so you can't establish a poor reputation. Guitar shopping peaked around 2012.

 

[Sermo Lupi]

It's less people buying guitars, flat-out. It's hard to say what the cause is, but it's definitely a thing. I mean, when I was in high school from 1998-2002, out of a class of like 150 students, we had like 4 different garage bands playing crappy hard rock/metal covers, and other classes had bands in them, too. These days it's a shocker if there's one band in the entire school. I've heard people speculate it's cause of social media making it so people are way more petrified to "put themselves out there" since anything they do will immediately be immortalized in video, but I think it's more just that rock music has not been popular in the mainstream sense since the early 00s. Like, you just don't see rock bands selling out big venues anymore unless they're a band that's been around since the early 00s if not earlier (Foo Fighters, Metallica, etc), and then most of the fans are old dudes. The only local rock bands you see anymore around here anyway are a bunch of over the hill dads who have day jobs. Some zoomers like bands like My Chemical Romance cause they liked them when they were 10 or whatever, but they don't seem to be much interested in actual new music.

And the impossibility of making enough money as a rock musician to even be able to like, afford health insurance in this country means it's no longer viable as a dream job for anyone.

Certainly plenty of zoomers listen to classic rock and stuff but only the real weirdos show any interest in actually learning how to play guitar, and they usually can't find anyone else that shares those interests to make a band with. The handful of weird high schoolers I've heard of the last several years (I have multiple music educators in my family and friends) have mostly been the type to just do everything themselves on their computer, either with a midi keyboard or just mouse/keyboard entry. We're just in a dark age for rock guitar.

Band programs have been suffering since Covid, but other than that I don't think there's a big change in the number of kids who take up instruments like that. They just aren't doing guitar or doing it purely as a hobby.

The online gear market is completely nuts these days, though, so it seems to me that as much or more money is being spent on gear as ever, it just is just going to online retailers/marketplaces, overpriced second-hand goods, and toward higher-end gear destined for collections. Maybe that gear ends up in fewer hands than it used to, but I don't think demand is the problem.

I think certain brick-and-mortars are struggling because they're being squeezed out of their market by their corporate partners rather than their consumers. Dealers simply aren't as valuable in terms of generating consumer interest as they used to be, which we've seen reflected in the manufacturer malaise toward trade shows like NAMM as well.

I'm pretty sure a ton of people predicted this would happen this year.

GC is not doing so hot, either. I won't be too surprised if they're next.

It's not JUST because of online sales, because manufacturers of guitars are taking a bit of an economic beating as well. It's a combination of a lot of things deadly to an industry: young people don't have very much interest in playing, old people don't have as much interest in buying new, the market is glutted with cheap crap no one wants to play, prices are getting out of control making buying even less appealing... etc.

Back in, say 1994, if you wanted to start out, you could get a nice Squier or Ibanez Rg350 or Washburn MG24 or any one of a hundred other brands that made affordable stuff that was decent quality, and you could buy it off a week's salary working at McD's. By then, your more "bad" guitars, like Magnum and Teisco and such, were already over with. So, odds of buying a guitar that would end up ruining your motivation were relatively low.

Now, your nice Squiers cost 5x as much, cheap Ibanezes are much chinsier, and the mid-tier stuff is way more expensive, and a lot of the other decent manufacturers in that bracket folded. There's a ton of horseshit coming from China or wherever and the brand names change every week so you can't establish a poor reputation. Guitar shopping peaked around 2012.

To the industry's credit, most players seem to agree that lower-end and mid-range guitars are better than they've ever been. It's just that the premise of buying used is so much more attractive in the current economy, considering you can save 50% of the cost of new without too much of an inconvenience when searching for a deal.

I totally agree that the late 2000s and early 2010s were pretty much the peak of gear trading in hindsight, though. Despite the marketplaces being less robust (no 'one-stop' shopping, poor quality photos on listings, a lot of gear trading went on behind closed doors in forums, etc.), the prices were generally pretty good and people weren't so panicked to miss out on things.

 

[Sermo Lupi]

Another facet of this that is often overlooked: I'm curious how this plays out in 10+ years' time when more of the boomer generation starts to pass away. Boomers now aged 60-78 will be aged 70-88, which is closer to when they begin to age out of hobbies or pass away.

If fewer brick-and-mortar shops are around, it won't be as easy to take dad's/grandpa's guitars down to the local shop to consign or trade them in all at once. Estate sales and auctions generally don't deal with used instruments for a variety of reasons, and bereaved relatives often don't want to part out collections online, piece-by-piece.

That gear will find its way onto the market one way or another, but I don't see many people discussing how the death of retail giants like Guitar Center would disrupt all of this. Boomers being as asset-rich as they are, there's probably a lot of stuff out there waiting to be sold in the not-too-distant future.

 

[nightsprinter]

I stopped by the Cleveland store when this was announced and the best I saw for discount for stuff I was interested in was 10%, not that great. Store was pretty depressing too. I did see this bass though, if it were 5 string it would have come home with me:

View attachment 143016

Jackson sure does know how to pick the dullest dryest fingerboards. Someone oil that poor thing!

 

[thebeesknees22]

....

That gear will find its way onto the market one way or another, but I don't see many people discussing how the death of retail giants like Guitar Center would disrupt all of this. Boomers being as asset-rich as they are, there's probably a lot of stuff out there waiting to be sold in the not-too-distant future.

or the trash heap.

I can see kids of boomers inheriting gear they don't want just tossing it, and not dealing with the hassle of selling.

 

[NickK-UK]

Kids take their advice from online TikTok or from YouTube reviews.

Guitars - people mail order, then return if they don't like or reverb it if they grow tired of it. Prices are cheap from the Middle East.. and a large number of guitarists will stop with the cheap guitar they get from the east.
Amps aren't favoured, with smaller living spaces and rentals being common it makes it hard to move gear. Add to the cost of running etc.
Software amp patches don't need a store - you download and go to your computer/simulator.
The makers/DIY are still there but all the components are geographic mail-order too.

 

[mpexus]

Guitar sales are on the decline since a long time... Covid and Lockdown just briefly put a stop to that because people were bored.

Everything changes and new generations give zero F's about Music like we did and much less care about guitar driven music. Prices keep going insanely high like they have been for the past 10 years that also drives people away... I mean how the F does a Amp head cost more than a freaking used car? Who buys that stuff? For what ? To play Live for 20 -30 or 100 tops people once in a while? To capture it and sell the captures?

I really don't understand how Amp builders are still on the business to be honest. How many Amps at 3-4K one has to sell to make a profit? Sure there are Amp collectors out there, we seem them daily on YT with their backgrounds full of shit they rarely use or even demo apart from the flavour of the month. But that is not the majority of players.

Like previous post already noted people live in small apartment's, they cant have Amps and there are hundreds of thousands of player's that grew up not playing a single Amp but VSTs instead and when they dabble outside of them is to get a QC or Helix or Fractal or some other cheaper solution.

Guitars are a bit of the same. For someone not playing live at all which is the majority of guitar players why does anyone need a 2-3-5-6-7K guitar? Those that are endorsed and have free access to them don't even take them on tour instead they use their cheaper off the shelf 1K ones (Insert known old school Thrash Metal players name's here).

Music gear business especially on the guitar world become really a parody. Every year brands keep putting out the same shit with different colours. There's really nothing new and when there is people reject it because that's not how it was in the old days. Can anyone imagine keyboard makers releasing the same model every year just with different colours or some keys coloured different? Would be ridiculous... but for some reason we guitar player geek on that shit

 

[OmegaSlayer]

That sucks. It seems it is a victim of capitalism.

I enjoyed working in that industry for a while in 2014-2019. Certain US-based distributors were certainly doing well. There was a GC in Fort Wayne near Sweetwater's location where Sweetwater literally bought the billboard in front of the Guitar Center's lot. It seemed a pretty bold jab.

Except for pawn shops, ebay, and Reverb, we have hit that time of dwindling competition and more near-monopolies.

I'm a simple man, I see anticapitalistic remarks, I press like

 

[spudmunkey]

I stopped by the Cleveland store when this was announced and the best I saw for discount for stuff I was interested in was 10%, not that great. Store was pretty depressing too. I did see this bass though, if it were 5 string it would have come home with me:

View attachment 143016

If it's anything like any other store closing I've ever been to, it'll play out like this:
I'tll stay 10% for a while.

Then "UP TO" 20-25% with most things still at 10%.

Then once it hits "up to 30%", literally nothing left is appealing unless you've got niche tastes.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

It happens.

I don't think it's necessarily a window into the industry as a whole, plenty of stores and chains close, we think of long standing ones as somewhat "safe" but any company is a few bad decisions at just the wrong time away from taking a dive.

Guitar Center's stores haven't been real money makers in years, but the online business and a string of behind the scenes sales to different investors and firms who have managed the debt have kept them chugging along. No pun.

I mean, I remember when Mars Music went out of business, folks were saying it was "the end of musical retail" but here we are.

 

[TheInvisibleHand]

This is not surprising at all. If you want anything other than higher end stuff, you’ll shop at Sweetwater and get better customer service and better peace of mind that the product hasn’t been hanging on a wall being abuse by sticky teenagers. If you want the top tier stuff, you’ll go to the likes of axe palace, Brian’s, ish, or any other boutique shop that will give you the best possible experience.

You guys act like samash was
Somehow brutally steamrolled by the capitalist engine , but they didn’t offer anything that you couldn’t get in a better way somewhere else.

This closure isn’t the referendum on the decline of guitar playing as we know it. Stop being so melodramatic.

 

[Marked Man]

You won't see the good deals until they are further into the sale which is how these things work. Not just going to drop their drawers right away. But, they'll get desperate as closing nears and then the great deals will come.

It was a matter of when for Sam Ash. In an age where web sales are king, they had a web site that makes Guitar Centers look good. Just a company that never evolved with the times.

Like a micro version of Sears.

 

[tedtan]

From what I’ve seen of their communications on this, it looks like they are closing their retail stores and shifting to an online business model, which should be more profitable. They’ll need a major update to their website to be successful, but I don’t see how this, in and of itself, is portends an end to the musical instrument retail business. Maybe if their online store fails - and GC fails as well - but not this alone.

 

[Grindspine]

This is not surprising at all. If you want anything other than higher end stuff, you’ll shop at Sweetwater and get better customer service and better peace of mind that the product hasn’t been hanging on a wall being abuse by sticky teenagers.

Gotta point out that Sweetwater's ever-growing retail front store has plenty of guitars that are abused by sticky handed teens (and adults).

There was a period of three years when I was the person cleaning those instruments and making the decision whether guitars were still able to ship as "new" or dropped down to demo status.