The Trade
Guitar Center's Chapter 11 and What Came Out the Other Side
The filing made headlines as a retail death notice. The balance sheet told a different story.
Section 1 of five
The Trade
What happened to the market — the filings, the acquisitions, the channels that replaced the shop floor.
eight pieces · every section-
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The TradeThe End of the Juszkiewicz Era
Gibson's 2018 bankruptcy, thirty years of accumulated strategy, and what KKR found when it arrived
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The TradeFender's Best Two Years and What the Retention Numbers Said
A pandemic sales record collided with a dropout rate Fender had already measured.
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The TradeReverb: Bought by Etsy, Sold Back, and What It Means for the Used Market
Two transactions, five years apart, frame everything the used-instrument trade learned about living inside a general platform.
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The TradeHow Andertons Turned the Demo Into the Channel
A Guildford music retailer built a YouTube presence that made the in-store demo redundant — and then made the catalogue redundant too.
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The TradeThe Two Channels That Took the Floor
One is in Fort Wayne, Indiana. One is in a German village. Together they reshaped what it means to sell an instrument.
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The TradeWhat the NAMM Floor Lost
Documents the contraction of the NAMM Show in Anaheim — exhibitor count, floor square footage, and the exit of major manufacturers from in-person debuts between 2018 and 2024 — and asks what the trade show format does that a product video on YouTube does not..
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The TradeThe Boutique Pedal Market and Its Particular Logic
Why small-run effects pedals hold prices that the Behringer clone economy cannot touch — and what keeps that floor in place.
The other sections
Section 2
What Sells Now
The products that reshaped the floor — modellers, interfaces, microphones, controllers, and the used-market bubble.
Section 3Materials and Rules
CITES listings, timber shortages, the Lacey Act, and what the industry started building from instead.
Section 4Working Order
What a technician does — fret work, valve biasing, capstan wear, humidity, the right-to-repair argument.
Section 5The Long Objects
The instruments and tools that arrived, settled, and never really left — their origins, their run, their record.