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Guitar sales displace DJs

Author: Jonty Skrufff
Friday, January 19, 2007

Sales of electric and acoustic guitars hit almost one million units last year, the Times reported this week, prompting the newspaper to claim the sales boom means ‘hip-hop has had its day’.

“Guitar sales in Britain have hit a high as young people turn away from the cult of the DJ,” Times reporter Adam Sherwin suggested. “And their parents seek to have another crack at the instrument of their youth.”

While the writer’s hip-hop/DJ culture is dead assertion seems dubious at best, his identification of sales being boosted by veteran rockers recapturing their youth reflected the analysis of guitar expert George Gruhn, who two years ago said wealthy senior citizens were behind the explosion of the vintage guitar market, worldwide.

"A large percentage of my customers are baby boomers. We have fewer customers for high-end instruments from generations X and Y,” he told US journalist Larry Meiners in 2004.

“It is a concern to me that the oldest boomers are now 57 years old,” he added.

The one million sales mark in the UK was almost double the figure for guitar sales in 1999, the year when sales of turntables reputedly overtook guitars for the first time. Whether turntables will one day enjoy a sales renaissance remains to be seen, though with digital download sales doubling this year, their short-term future looks stark.
 
“We can safely say that as far as the era of vinyl is concerned it’s not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’,” the progressive house superstar DJ John Digweed told Skrufff in 2005.

“So many DJs are nowadays using only CDs that you go to clubs and you’re lucky if you can find a turntable working properly,” he added.
www.skrufff.com 
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