This is amazing to me. I had no idea that guitar sales were doing so well. I would be careful about not being sure about what he says about these things. In the beginning of the vid he gives a little bio of himself. No college but he convinced people at these companies to let him take whatever tests they wanted and he was hired as CFO of Nike UK. He's played guitar for 50 years and now he's CEO of Fender. That's impressive and the guy is obviously brilliant.

The growth is coming from the digital side not the brick and mortar store side. His stats are very interesting and enlightening. 45% of new guitar sales were to first time players and of that group 50% were women. It's the women who don't like going into a store because they feel they don't belong to the "club" so they buy online from Fenders relatively new digital division. I liked his answer to how expensive good instruments are. He said young people have no problem paying $1,000 every few years for a new smart phone so paying that much for a nice instrument is no problem either. There's plenty of money out there.

I really liked his description of how Fender Play works. He created an online community and almost immediately got 10,000 members. He thought they would be mostly young people but no, it's 50/50 between those and middle aged empty nesters who now have the time and money to pursue music. I think that's great and we see some of that here too.

I found this very interesting, thanks for posting it.

Bob

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