Passing along this interesting article from Rolling Stone.
Sales of Instruments and Music Gear Are Soaring. Will Quarantine Spark a Renaissance?
I’m an Elektron fan so nice to see them get a mention in Rolling Stone.
As creative consumers continue to stay home, they’re investing in gear for their home-rigs and studios — mics, speakers, audio interfaces, music-making software, and more. Searches for audio interfaces are up 303% year-over-year.”…
Complexity, dear Watson
Purchases of expensive, multi-faceted gear may suggest a rise in the complexity of music that people are creating nowadays.
“Drum machines and sequencers are greatly outselling live percussion instruments, which isn’t what we typically see,” says Tuerk. “In particular, we saw a significant increase in Elektron orders — specifically the Digitone polyphonic digital synthesizer and the Digitakt digital drum computer & sampler — compared to the month prior and this time last year. Elektron synthesizers and drum machines are typically used to make serious electronic music. They’re intricate pieces of gear and require more time to master, so the increase in Elektron orders leads me to believe that people are making more complex music at home.”
— Jim Tuerk, Reverb’s business development director
Sweetwater and other retailers are seeing a big uptick in sales as well.
Music retailer Sweetwater has also seen a significant uptick in content and product sales from its website. Sweetwater CEO Chuck Surack tells Rolling Stone that the previous seven days were bigger than the week they had after Thanksgiving last year. Sweetwater is getting 500,000 visitors a day — around double what they’d normally see — and they’re shipping about 15-20,000 orders every day, he says.
Mark Mosher 