What Music Shops Used to Give Us

A music shop was never really just a place that sold equipment, whatever it said above the door.

Throughout the 90s I was the International demonstrator for Takamine and Parker guitars, and pretty much every day was spent in a music shop somewhere in Europe and latterly USA, Brazil and Japan, so I feel singularly qualified to talk about music stores as, particularly in the UK, there were easily 1000 physical music shops back then, and I visited pretty much all of them in my time….

The image above is of a random page towards the back of a Guitarist mag 26 yrs ago. There were many more pages full…

Stores were where you found out who else in a fifteen mile radius played the same instrument you did, because you'd bump into them stood at the same wall of pedals, both pretending you could afford something you couldn't. It was where the bloke behind the counter, who'd usually been in a band that nearly made it, would show you a chord shape. It was a noticeboard that actually worked, drummer wanted, amp for sale, lessons offered, in handwriting, pinned up by people you might actually meet.

None of that was the stated business. The stated business was selling strings and making a decent margin on amplifiers. But the actual value, the thing that turned a shop into somewhere you'd hang around for an hour with no intention of buying anything, was all the unofficial stuff happening around the edges of the till. The community. The apprenticeship, informal and unpaid, that happened just by being in the room with people who knew more than you.

A lot of that has thinned out, for reasons that are obvious and not really anyone's fault. You don't need to go anywhere to compare eleven pedals anymore, or to find out who's looking for a bass player. It's all online, instantly, with none of the friction that used to force you into a room with actual people.

As someone who makes a living consulting on new ways for customers to buy, I don't think the answer is pretending that's all bad, because plenty of it is genuinely more convenient now, and with the advent of AI on your phone, all you really need to do is to ask your particular agent to go out and find the best deal on a Fender Vintera or whatever, and job done.

At Scan Pro Audio we have an appointment system which works brilliantly. You let us know what you’re interested in and we’ll have it all set up and ready for you to demo to your heart's content, why? Because there’s no way we could put everything out and available for customers, we have over 8000 different SKUs, and because there’s nothing worse than travelling to a store to find out they haven’t got what you require, so our appointment system works very well….

But yes, I do think something got quietly lost that nobody quite noticed leaving, and it's worth saying out loud occasionally, if only so the people who never got to experience it know it used to exist.