“The era of the guitar hero and rock star being a central part of the pop culture lexicon is long gone,” said James Wengrow, an Australian jazz guitarist and a member of the “Kinsmen and Strangers” band whose new album is entitled “Faustian Pact.” The popularity of hip-hop and rap music has also affected the guitar’s popularity. The true artist in the company - the guy who builds a guitar by carving it out of a piece of wood hopefully will be the one that will be celebrated, not the middle management.” Hook, who covered the economics of running a nightclub in his 2009 book, “The Hacienda: How Not To Run a Club”, predicted: “The guitar companies are going to restructure and get smaller. “It doesn’t do a brand well when you see Gibson, Fender and Epiphone guitars flooding Costco Salas added at the other end of the market, the budget guitar market is harming the industry. A standard Fender Stratocaster retails for a price of around $1,300. Salas, who recently produced “Rumble,” a documentary about Native American influence on rock music, said he recently met with a Korean guitar company in Amsterdam who said they could make a Fender Stratocaster for $23. “Is a 16- year-old going to spend $3,000 on a Les Paul guitar? Are you kidding me? The prices have gone bananas on guitars.” “When I was a kid, I could buy a Les Paul guitar for 400 bucks,” he said. The high price of guitars, Salas added, doesn’t help. I wouldn’t be caught dead doing that! Can you imagine Elton John or Rod Stewart playing in a living room? The whole idea of mystery is out the window,” he said. “People can walk around with the acoustic guitar and play in people’s living rooms. You don’t need an amplifier and a PA system as you do for an electric guitar.”Īlso see: As Gibson files for bankruptcy, are people falling out of love with guitars? That’s the affordable way to tour for today’s musicians. Instead, he said, “Ed Sheeran grabs an acoustic guitar like a busker, plugs into a couple of digital boxes and creates his own backdrops to his song. Record companies aren’t offsetting the tour expenses because they can’t make their money back in record sales.” “When I used to tour with Rod Stewart, we had jets and gigantic trucks but now there’s no record-company support so no there’s tour support. “The acoustic guitar is something you can travel with easier and make money with easier,” Salas said. Promoted by the likes of Ed Sheeran and Jack Johnson, the acoustic guitar is increasingly becoming more popular at the expense of the electric guitar. That’s what has caused a lot of harm to such a luxury product.” “Gibson guitars are expensive and they have been taken over by so many cheap copies. It’s a small specialist market,” Hook said. “But I was recently talking to a guy at Yamaha who told me the total global revenue from musical equipment sales sold round the world doesn’t add up to one-thousandth of Apple’sĭaily turnover. It’s unbelievable that they’re going bankrupt.” “If you turn on the radio, you’ll hear a Gibson guitar within minutes. “You think of the wonderful music that has been made on Gibson guitars - everybody from The Who to David Bowie,” he said. Peter Hook, the former New Order and Joy Division bassist who is presently touring the US with his band Peter Hook and The Light, told MarketWatch that guitar companies have discovered they aren’t too big to fail. While in the past decade, sales of the electric guitar have fallen from 1.5 million to 1 million, according to the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) a total of 2.6 million guitars, including both acoustic and electric guitars, were sold in the U.S.
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The guitar, however, appears to be in better shape than the guitar maker. Yet Clapton himself even speculated at last year’s Toronto Film Festival that “maybe the guitar is over.” Gibson’s most popular instrument, the Les Paul guitar, has been used by guitarists including Eric Clapton, Slash and Jimmy Page. The debt of Fender Musical Instruments Corp, another leading guitar company renowned for its Fender Stratocaster guitar, is estimated at $100 million. Gibson is not the solo guitar company that is in peril.
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The company has announced it will liquidate its consumer-electronics business while restructuring its business to focus on its musical instruments. Gibson pursued a diversification strategy as a “music lifestyle” brand, pivoting unsuccessfully into the home entertainment and audio-equipment industries. The bankruptcy petition estimated its debt could be as much as $500 million. Between 20, Gibson’s revenue fell from $2.1 billion to $1.7 billion.