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To Mr. Tyler's credit, at least he has his foot on the bench instead of the piano!
I knew a piano department head at a university who lamented that people prefer to suffer in groups. (Choir practice can be just as miserable as Czerny, but for the social aspects.)
Also, people went a little crazy in the early 80s over the Tylenol poisonings (remember that?), which spooked unrelated, vaguely risky things such as trick or treat to unlit houses, walking home from school, individual lessons in creepy persons' houses, etc.
In contrast to the numbers that opened this discussion, here's a nice article from the Chicago Tribune about how the piano business is currently on an upswing:
It was combination of the beginning of the recession which began in 1982 and the end of the baby boomer children taking lessons. The baby boomers were a product of their parent's generation. We all had to learn the piano. When those parents of the baby boomers stopped having children of piano lesson age, the numbers started falling.
Also since I've been in the piano business through several recessions, many of us in the industry have always noted that that we are the first to go and the last to recover in downturns. This past recession started for us in the fall of 2005. One of my long time friends and reps called me and said, "This is going to be a big one." noting that the furniture store parking lots were empty. Sales slowed dramatically for many dealers when the economy seemed ok, especially the mid range pricing.
I was also working for Baldwin in 1983 just after the start of the recession at that time. It is hard to believe now but Baldwin had 500 dealers at that time. I mean every tiny hamlet had a Baldwin dealer and we all watched them just dry up and disappear. I remember a meeting with some of the big cheeses at the time when Harold Smith the then president of the manufacturing area scoffed at a marketing report showing that Baldwin had a huge percentage of the sales in the US. He just said, "We'll, 100% of zero is zero."
I think that, as usual, Sally hit the nail on the head. The recession coupled with the Baby Boomer demographics were the main factors.
Piano Industry Consultant
Co-author (with Larry Fine) of Practical Piano Valuation www.jasonsmc@msn.com
Contributing Editor & Consultant - Acoustic & Digital Piano Buyer
Retired owned of Jasons Music Center Maryland/DC/No. VA Family Owned and Operated Since 1937.
"Discipline is more reliable than motivation." -by a contributor on Reddit r/piano "Success is 10% inspiration, and 90% perspiration." -by some other wise person "Pianoteq manages to keep it all together yet simultaneously also go in all directions; like a quantum particle entangled with an unknown and spooky parallel universe simply waiting to be discovered." -by Pete14
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Possibly a country issue (some websites can't be accessed outside of the country they are hosted in). Here is the text of the article:
Quote
Hitting a low note: Pianos becoming extinct in US homes
By Max Sullivan msullivan@seacoastonline.com Posted Jul 29, 2018 at 3:15 AM Updated Jul 30, 2018 at 12:16 PM
Once a fixture in the American home, pianos are easy to find for cheap these days and those who own them are having trouble finding people take them off their hands.
Roger Ward of Barrington said he has been trying to give away his Kohler & Campbell upright piano for free for the last two years. He offered it to his Elks lodge and his American Legion post, but they were not interested. He said a former worker of his was “all charged up†to take the piano for his daughter, who is learning how to play, but that never materialized.
The Chickering & Sons baby grand piano in Jeff Curran’s York, Maine, summer home is selling for $150, or best offer, on Craigslist. He has also tried donating the piano to a church and a family friend.
“It’s hard to get rid of one,†said Curran.
Ward’s and Curran’s listings are among dozens on Craigslist and other sites like Facebook, pianos selling for cheap or being offered for free. A trend of unwanted pianos has been felt across the nation for years, according to news reports.
The National Association of Music Merchants reports merchandisers sold 364,500 pianos in 1909, but it’s been a steady slide since, picking up speed in the 21st century.
Chalise Zolezzi, director of public relations and social media for NAMM, said recent data shows total piano sales, including digital pianos, have been at a high for the past 10 years. Still, according to Statista, there were 95,518 sales of acoustic pianos in the United States in 2005 and just 31,530 in 2017.
Not all pianos find homes. Kevin Finkenaur of Liberty Bell Moving & Storage of Portsmouth, said his company hauls dozens of pianos a week, and about one in 10 of those are sent to a local transfer station or are broken down for wood and scrap metal.
Paul Dykstra, who also teaches piano in Portsmouth and who previously sold pianos for Yamaha, said Yamaha sold fewer acoustic pianos as years went by because customers were instead buying electric pianos. He said the digitization of music over the decades, as well as the increase in activities available to young people, has pulled attention away from the acoustic piano and the music for which it was designed.
“The serious kids, the kids who are into serious classical piano, that number has gone down,†said Dykstra. “It’s too many things competing for their time.â€
Dykstra believes fewer families with acoustic pianos does not equate to fewer children with opportunities to learn classical music. Rather, he believes it merely weeds out those who are less serious about music meant to be played on an acoustic piano whose interest would have eventually dwindled.
He said budding pianists will always eventually learn that the rich dynamic of an acoustic piano is not easily replicated digitally without buying a keyboard worth thousands of dollars, and even higher-end keyboards are still not quite the same.
“If you want to play Rachmaninoff, you’re not going to be able to do that digitally,†said Dykstra. “There’s still no way out of a Steinway.â€
For those students who want to play an acoustic piano, Portsmouth piano teacher John Heath said the low demand for pianos makes now a better time than ever to acquire one.
“It’s a matter of finding a piano that’s in good enough shape,†said Heath, as many pianos on the market are aged and require attention from a piano technician. “There’s tons of them out there.â€
across the stone, deathless piano performances
"Discipline is more reliable than motivation." -by a contributor on Reddit r/piano "Success is 10% inspiration, and 90% perspiration." -by some other wise person "Pianoteq manages to keep it all together yet simultaneously also go in all directions; like a quantum particle entangled with an unknown and spooky parallel universe simply waiting to be discovered." -by Pete14
But I'm not sure I agree with the message of the article; that people buy less acoustic pianos because the classical culture is in decline. What the article doesn't mention is that digital pianos have improved considerably in the past decades. I wouldn't be surprised if a modern middle-class digital is more appealing for serious pianists than a middle-class spinet or console from 60 years ago. Plus, you can play with headphones, and have plenty of different sounds.
It is of course possible that the classical "piano culture" is decreasing in the USA; but just looking at sales numbers (acoustic vs. digital) is not enough to conclude it.
My grand piano is a Yamaha C2 SG. My other Yamaha is an XMAX 300.
Yeah I'm gonna weigh in on this again in RE: digitals. I tell pretty much everyone with less than $4000 to spend to buy a nice stage digital and a pair of high quality monitors. Owning a piano costs some serious money to keep it as musically consistent as a modern digital piano. I would rather own my (now worth less than $1500) Kawai MP11 and a $300 pair of monitors than anything but the most serious studio upright. Having a real piano in the home has lost its prestige and is now sadly a burden to many. I have a friend locally trying to rehome his grandma's Chickering console.
No surprise this thread blew up, as it represents a topic that stands at the intersection of so many economic, cultural, and technological conversations. Add a dash of angry politics and inter-generational warfare and you've got a rootin' tootin' five page thread
2012 NY Steinway Model B | Kawai MP11 | Nord Stage 3 Compact | Moog Matriarch | ASM Hydrasynth 49 | Sequential Circuits Prophet 10 Rev4 | Yamaha ModX 61
"...and Lawrence Welk had overstayed his welcome..."
Well, maybe with you and me. But here's a news flash for you: The Lawrence Welk Show is still on the air to this very day.
I can remember being a horny 20-something lad waiting to hit the Town on Saturday night, watching The Lawrence Welk Show reruns on the local PBS station in the early evening, LOL. Now, Lawrence Welk precedes Led Zeppelin in my vast, eclectic music library.
The (classical music) culture of pianos is declined in the U.S., IMHO, is due to the chaotic state of music education in our society nowadays. To understand and to play classical music, one must take years of private lessons which are now way too expensive. The least expensive teachers charge $70 to $80 an hour, and prestigious schools of music can charge up to $120 an hour for private lessons! Given high tuition rates, only affluent members of society can afford music lessons for themselves or their kids. Furthermore, public schools cut budgets and, if any music programs remain in public schools, they are mostly for Strings (i.e. for students to learn violins). (Even for Strings, public schools' programs are merely basic start-up, but that is a topic of a different forum).
For many years now, I have not seen any public schools in my area offer free piano lessons in school to any kids. These combined factors of high private lesson rates and no public schools' promotion of piano learning have reduced the exposure of kids to piano music, especially the kids from poor families. Middle-class families may still try to introduce their children to music; however, given that most parents work a lot of hours a day, they don't have the time to encourage kids to practice lessons. Furthermore, most of these parents themselves have not much knowledge about music instruments, or music in general, much less about classical music. So, when they choose an instrument for their child, they may opt for something "easier to manage" without ongoing tuning or maintenance. And so, they'd choose a keyboard or a digital piano instead of an acoustic piano - mainly for practical reasons.
All -in-all, it's probably "the signs of the time", for lack of better terms. The 80's are now long-gone (though sometimes I missed those happy years when life was simpler and gentler.) Where our society is heading towards, in terms of music or piano music, remains speculative... I hope that one or several of us, who may still be alive around the years of 2050 and 2100, would come back here and share another post about the status of pianos in our society in those future years....!
"Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue." -- Plato
"When you play, never mind who listens to you." -- Robert Schumann
I am a sucker for demographic and economic data, so here is some more.
On a popular online forum called reddit.com, the 'piano' sub group has 81,000 subscribers. Other groups with similar numbers are 'handwriting' (80,000), 'poker' (80,000), 'Tatoo' (93,000), 'fountainpens' (90,000), 'lockpicking' (89,000), etc (gathered from redditlist).
In comparison, the 'music' group has 17 million subscribers, and 'violinists' has 13,800 subscribers. 'Jazz' has 90,000, and 'classicalmusic' has 303,000.
Browsing the 'piano' subreddit, I see lots of videos uploaded by young people starting out, most playing on digital pianos.
The interest in piano these days are probably mostly voluntary, and not forced onto them by their parents. I think that's largely a good thing.
The number of pianos per household went down by a factor of 12x between 1978 and 2015. (Annualized, this would amount to a reduction of approximately 7.5% per year vs the prior year, for each of those 37 years.)
across the stone, deathless piano performances
"Discipline is more reliable than motivation." -by a contributor on Reddit r/piano "Success is 10% inspiration, and 90% perspiration." -by some other wise person "Pianoteq manages to keep it all together yet simultaneously also go in all directions; like a quantum particle entangled with an unknown and spooky parallel universe simply waiting to be discovered." -by Pete14
I was an adult in 1980 and interest rates were going up rapidly. 16% for a home mortgage. Pianos are frequently financed or bought with a second mortgage. I’d guess a double digit interest rate might convince parents to have their child taking guitar or trombone lessons. Also 1980 was the golden time for guitar heroes. Piano was considered nerdy. As musical tastes change so do the instruments that kids want to study. Not much keyboard presence in hip-hop or EDM. Vinyl is back. Acoustic guitar is growing again. The world has become so digital, there’s something much more comforting in a completely analog, acoustic piano. I think sales of pianos in the US will increase eventually because sales of pianos in China is very strong and should come back here and in Europe.
J & J Estonia L190 Hidden Beauty Casio Privia P230 At least half the waiters in Nashville play better than I
If you look back at the numbers and charts first posted in this thread four years ago ... you might wonder about their accuracy. The claim is that pianos hit a peak in 1980 and then steeply declined. And that is from a single source: bluebookofpianos.com
Are the numbers right? I think not. I've read elsewhere that pianos have been on the decline for most of a century ... not just since 1980.
Are the numbers right? I think not. The sales figures for digital pianos seem WAAAAAY low.
I think we need a second and more authoritative source of data.
What I have come to believe from this forum is since digital pianos have improved there is a belief that upright accoustic pianos are not worth the getting .If you want an accoustic piano only a grand is worth getting. A used grand seems to have taken the place of upright pianos. I hope I am wrong because this is a sad error of judging upright accoustic pianos.
What I have come to believe from this forum is since digital pianos have improved there is a belief that upright accoustic pianos are not worth the getting .If you want an accoustic piano only a grand is worth getting. A used grand seems to have taken the place of upright pianos. I hope I am wrong because this is a sad error of judging upright accoustic pianos.
Yes, this is a common myth that is propounded by the digital piano manufacturers who are constantly trumpeting the idea that modern digital actions are very realistic simulations of grand piano actions, and thus, superior to upright actions. It is mostly marketing spin though. The only digital action I can say is genuinely better than the action in my Yamaha U3 is the Yamaha Avant Grand series and the Kawai Novus NV10 - and that's because they have a genuine grand piano action in them. The rest of them are not as good as the marketing spin suggests.
The same is true of the sound engines. Despite sampling high-quality grand pianos, none of them are as satisfying to play and listen to as my U3. The speaker systems do not deliver on the sound that was recorded, the resonance modelling and action/sound connection simply isn't as good. It is frequently mentioned on the DP forum that "a good digital beats an upright acoustic piano". I don't think that's true for anything but an old clapped out upright. A quality upright is still substantially better to play and learn piano on. Things have been steadily improving in the digital world, but it's got a way to go to match the real acoustic experience.
I don't say this as a technophobe. I'm very enthusiastic and interested in digital piano development. I spend a lot of my time here on the digital forum. I just have to be realistic about digitals' capabilities at this time.
What I have come to believe from this forum is since digital pianos have improved there is a belief that upright accoustic pianos are not worth the getting .If you want an accoustic piano only a grand is worth getting. A used grand seems to have taken the place of upright pianos. I hope I am wrong because this is a sad error of judging upright accoustic pianos.
Overall from reading many threads in AB/piano/digital sub-forums, my take is that acoustic uprights have a significant leg up on even the higher end digitals. The 'leg up' being feel of the vibrations (in your body and hands) and the control of the sound - of course, this has been discussed a lot and we don't need to repeat here. Digitals have specific appeal and many of us have both. But I do not see uprights as being disparaged in general in the forum.
Now of course I am an older guy (59) and maybe there is a generational slant also. When I was a bicyclist a couple decades ago, people on the forums would often have the discussion about what is the better bike - steel or carbon? The steel people would often say 'steel is real' (referring the feel when riding). Well, like pianos, there is room for both.
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