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To learn more about our privacy policy Click hereHEADLINES HAVEN’T BEEN kind to electric guitars. Slipping sales year over year made for a bleak portrait, and by last September, even Eric Clapton wondered if the instrument was on its way out. “Maybe the guitar is over,” he mused, responding to reports that electric guitar sales had crashed half a million in a single decade and that industry leaders Gibson and Fender were both in debt. As if fulfilling prophecy, Gibson, maker of the famed Les Paul model wielded by everyone from Jimmy Page to Slash, announced this month that it is filing for bankruptcy. The Guardian pondered the “End of the Guitar”; business news site Marketwatch asked if people might be “falling out of love with guitars” at last.
Actually, not quite. Guitar sales in many markets are on the rise, and the industry is in one of its more optimistic times. A report from research firm IBISWorld, which tracks guitar manufacturing in the U.S., shows consecutive growth in the last five years and a projected upswing through at least 2022. Even if today’s music fans are more likely to worship pop stars and rappers than their parents’ guitar heroes, there’s little to indicate that the guitar’s reign is over – and there might actually be more to show the opposite.
Gibson’s bankruptcy reflects much more on internal missteps than the health of the broader guitar industry, analysts say. The company freely admits its mistakes. Gibson took on an audio and home electronics business in 2014 that saddled it with debt; it’s pledging now to “unburden” itself of that division and “restructure” around its core business of musical instruments. “My dream had always been to build a major music lifestyle business, similar to what Nike is to sports, and grow beyond guitars. We tried to do that with the acquisition of a Phillips subsidiary and it didn’t work out very well,” Gibson’s CEO Henry Juszkiewicz tells Rolling Stone.