Gibson Starts Walking It Back
What do the gun business and the guitar business have in common? The answer is: Nearly everything.
Let's make a list:
The products appeal to a dwindling audience that is mostly white, male, and "cishet", despite attempts to expand the customer base. The Venn diagram of gun owners and guitar owners has a lot of overlap, although there are certainly plenty of musicians who would never even think of using violence, even in self defense, and there are also plenty of gun owners who have never touched a musical instrument. The customer groups are so similar that at least two of the major guitar forums have firearm subforums.
That audience is aging into irrelevance. Young people aren't very interested in guns or guitars. The average Millennial thinks of music as something other people make and he thinks of self-defense as a deeply reactionary and possibly racist act that he associates with "stand your ground", Oathkeeper types, and the entire state of Florida. It's illegal to own a gun in many major cities and it's difficult to play anything besides an acoustic guitar or a headphone amp. So the demographic for both is going South and Southwest. The majority of the "guitar music" on the radio nowadays comes from Nashville, not Liverpool or Laurel Canyon.
The products are durable and rarely need replacement. You can't "shoot out" a modern firearm in anything approaching normal use. A Glock can run 30,000 rounds between cleanings. Even something like a Smith and Wesson Model 629, the famous .44 Magnum revolver that is infamous for suffering "timing issues" after firing full-power Magnum rounds. can be cheaply fixed over and over again. Guitars are like that as well. If Willie Nelson can't wear out his guitar, neither can you. And a solidbody guitar like a Les Paul will last a hundred years or more with the occasional refret. So people don't have to replace their guns or their guitars the way they do clothes, cars, motorcycles, or computers.
It's difficult and expensive to make the products in the Western World. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about Bulgarian AKs or Chinese Epiphones; nowadays, if you're going to make a guitar or a gun in the United States or Western Europe you're going to face steep price competition from low-cost countries that will force you upmarket. Even the cheapest entry-level US-made guitars from Gibson, PRS, and Fender can run eight hundred dollars or more. That's also what you will pay for a basic American-made 1911-pattern pistol, brand new. Put this together with the previous point --- the used stuff is as good as the new --- and you can easily see that used American-made products are the other major reason people don't buy new American-made products in these categories.
There are legislative barriers to making the product in the United States. American gun manufacturers actually have it pretty easy compared to importers --- there are several kinds of guns that can only be made here thanks to import restrictions. But every year there's a new Congress that tries to limit the product mix. Guitar makers don't face any such problem, although I think some sort of reasonable restriction on double-neck "Assault Guitars" would make sense. They do, however, face constant persecution for CITES and Lacey Act violations real and imagined and that, along with OSHA and EPA regulations, cause a lot of makers to throw up their hands and send the work overseas.
The buyers are highly resistant to change. We'll get back to this point as far as guitars go, but with guns it's absolutely true. Nobody wants to be the first person to defend themselves with a new kind of pistol or shotgun.
A large percent of the buyer base purchases multiple products. Very few people collect KitchenAid mixers or sofas or hammers or hot water heaters --- but most of the people who own a gun in fact own several guns, and the same is true for guitars. For that reason, it's always more profitable to market to your existing customers than it would be to get new ones.
Keep all that in mind as we discuss the problem currently facing Gibson Guitars. Knowing that their customer base is literally dying out from under them, and also knowing that their best bet to find new customers and extract additional sales from current customers is to come up with something shocking and different, the company has spent the entire past decade trying to reinvent the guitar. Experienced Gibson watchers can name the ambitious failures: Robot Guitar. Dark Fire. Dusk Tiger. Reverse V. Firebird X. Virtually all of these products feature significant electronic integration into a product, the electric guitar, that has traditionally been a simple arrangement of wires, magnets, and potentiometers. None of these "innovations" have found much of an audience, although if you want a Dusk Tiger or Dark Fire for your collection today you should be prepared to spend real money for what many Gibson aficionados consider completely useless but historically significant instruments.
For 2015, Gibson decided to force its package of "innovations" on the entire line of USA-made guitars. The electronic features of robot tuning and printed-circuit-board tone wiring were accompanied by radical changes in the neck width and a "zero fret" intonation system. Everybody in the business outside Gibson understood how unpopular these new guitars would be, but that didn't stop the company from announcing massive price increases across the board for 2015.
The result? Volume has fallen through the floor and guitars are becoming dusty on the hangers.
Under the leadership of "Henry J", Gibson's non-musician wonderboy CEO who bought the company along with a few other Harvard grads thirty years ago, the company rarely admits fault and rarely listens to customers outside their treasured "whales" who buy whole living rooms full of the $12,000 Murphy Aged Custom Shop Reissues. This year, however, the disaster situation at the dealers has been bad enough for the company to do a "Sprint Run" of midyear guitars for 2015.
The sales pitch for these guitars is, and I'm not kidding you here, that they aren't quite as bad as the rest of the 2015 models. No robot tuners and standard-width necks! Woo hoo!" It's like an alternate universe where Porsche admitted defeat and brought back the 993 in the year 2000. (That would have been a brilliant idea, by the way.)
Pretty much everybody in the guitar biz is applauding the Sprint Run, even if they are being a bit cynical about it. "Leave well enough alone," they say. But the electric guitar can't survive if all anybody does is build old-style guitars to sell to old people. Somebody needs to figure out a way to make the instrument relevant to young people. Maybe it isn't robotic tuning or weird shapes or onboard processors --- but it has to be something. Otherwise, the guitar will be the accordion of the twenty-first century. You do know that the accordion was once the best-selling instrument in America, don't you?