“Who Will Save the Guitar?”
Michael Molenda · 2019
Popular music studies scholar Kevin Dettmar has shown in his book Is Rock Dead? , fans, critics, and musicians alike have been declaring rock’s demise for decades, to the point where the death of rock almost seems like a necessary correlate to the music’s continued vitality and growth. The big guitar and guitar-gear companies are hardly fading into extinction—though many have struggled in the current popular-culture climate that is not as conducive to guitar-product sales as other periods in the past when the guitar was more on top of the world, so to speak. “The guitar industry has been on the decline, and, unfortunately, guitar manufacturers haven’t addressed the problem,” says Rusty Shaffer. “The guitar industry is basically a ski resort with no bunny slope. When guitarists talk about getting significantly more beginners into the ranks, there is always that fear that successfully appealing to a mass audience will mean “dumbing down” guitarcraft.