2½ Years Behind the Counter: What the Guitar Industry Looks Like From Where We’re Standing

We’ve been in the guitar industry for around two and a half years now, which probably makes us both experienced enough to have an opinion and nowhere near experienced enough to claim that the opinion is right.

When we started The Woodshed, we really had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. There wasn't a grand, meticulously researched business plan behind it. Truth be told, we were at a bit of a loose end, we both loved music and guitars, and we decided this was something we really wanted to do. So we leant into it.

In hindsight, that naivety may actually have helped us. We didn't enter the industry with many preconceived ideas about how a guitar shop was supposed to operate. We did things in a way that felt right to us, and thankfully people seemed to respond well to it.

Two and a half years later, The Woodshed has become a stable little business, our workshop keeps us busy, guitars come and go every week and, most importantly, people keep coming back (which we will never take for granted).

And that's interesting, because depending on who you speak to, the guitar industry is supposedly in trouble.

Big music retailers have closed. Guitar isn't at the forefront of mainstream music in the way it once was. There aren't as many enormous guitar bands breaking through and dominating popular culture. Now we're entering the age of AI-generated music, which brings another round of questions about what the future of musicianship might look like.

All of those things are worth talking about.

But from where we're standing?

It really doesn't feel like guitar is dying.

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There Are A Lot of Guitars Out There

One of the first things you realise when dealing predominantly in pre-owned instruments is just how many guitars are out there.

There's no real shortage of stock.

You could look at that negatively and say there's too much competition. In certain areas, there probably is. But we've found that a busy pre-owned market also creates opportunity.

People want fair prices. They're open to trading. And many would still rather deal with somebody they trust, who has a reputation to maintain.

From the buyer's perspective, there's also value in knowing that the pre-owned guitar they're looking at has been properly checked, serviced, set up and listed accurately.

As a result, buying stock has thankfully never been a major problem for us. If anything, the amount available means we can be selective. We can concentrate on good-quality, interesting instruments that we can get excited about hanging on our shop walls.

And our experience so far is fairly simple:

If it's a genuinely good instrument, there's usually somebody out there who wants it.

The difficult bit is connecting the two.

That's where the internet has completely changed what being a small independent guitar shop can mean.

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The Internet Has Changed the Independent Guitar Shop

You might assume the internet would be one of the biggest threats to a small physical guitar shop.

In reality, for us at least, it's much more complicated than that.

With new products, the internet can be difficult. If ten retailers are selling exactly the same product, it's very easy for the conversation to become about price. Online-only businesses can operate differently from physical shops, and everyone ends up competing over the same products and customers.

Interestingly, we tend to sell a lot of our new equipment locally, in the shop. People want to see it, try it and compare it.

Pre-owned is almost the opposite.

The internet has given a little independent shop like ours the ability to market worldwide.

And when you've got something unusual, that matters enormously.

Someone might have been searching for a particular guitar for months or even years. It might be discontinued, a specific finish, an unusual model, an old Tokai, a particular signature guitar or simply something they remember wanting when they were younger and can finally afford.

Suddenly, it doesn't particularly matter that they live nowhere near us.

We've shipped guitars around the world because the internet allows that one instrument to find the person who's been waiting for it, and because we're a small operation, we're able to make that experience almost as personal as it would be in the actual shop.

That's an extraordinary advantage for an independent business that simply wouldn't have existed in the same way a few decades ago.

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So, Who Is Actually Buying All These Guitars?

This is perhaps the biggest thing we've learned.

There isn't really one typical guitar customer.

We see professional musicians looking for their next workhorse. Session players. Gigging musicians. Collectors. Traders. Tone chasers. Lifelong enthusiasts. Complete beginners. Teenagers trading their way towards better instruments. Parents coming in to buy their child their first proper guitar after they've proven they're genuinely interested.

Then there are the home players.

This is a group that perhaps doesn't get talked about enough when people discuss the health of guitar music.

Not everybody who plays guitar wants to be in a band, or even on a stage.

Many people just really enjoy playing guitar.

They come home from work, pick up an instrument and disappear into it for an hour. It's a hobby. It's relaxing. It's something absorbing that gets you away from sitting in front of the television or endlessly doomscrolling on your phone.

They may never play a gig in their life.

They're still guitarists.

And different groups seem to approach instruments in noticeably different ways.

A lot of older customers simply love guitars. They've been around them for decades, they've always wanted a particular model, or something catches their eye and they think, I've always wanted one of those.

Collectors can be surprisingly similar. Of course, some people buy consciously with future values in mind, but we see plenty of purchases that are much less calculated than that.

Sometimes the explanation really is just:

“I really want to own one of these.”

Professional players can be completely different. They're often intensely interested in finding the best-sounding and best-playing instrument for the job. It's a tool, and it has to work.

Then you've got the tone chasers, who can be more interested in what they're hearing than what's written on the headstock.

And younger players often seem particularly interested in what they can actually do with the instrument. They’re less concerned with whether a guitar fits neatly into a traditional category and more interested in whether it helps them create the sounds they’re hearing in their heads. That might mean experimenting with effects, alternate tunings, extended techniques or styles that sit somewhere between established genres.

Which brings us to another major change we've noticed.

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The New Guitar Heroes

The classics still sell.

Stratocasters, Telecasters, Les Pauls, Fender, Gibson — none of that has suddenly disappeared.

Neither has the enthusiasm for older, distinctive or more unusual instruments. Good-quality vintage and pre-owned guitars, sought-after Japanese instruments and pre-lawsuit models still attract plenty of attention.

What's changing is who influences the next generation of guitarists.

For decades, the obvious route to becoming a guitar hero was being the guitarist in a famous band.

That's no longer the only route, or even the dominant one.

We've had signature guitars through the shop associated with players such as Jared James Nichols, while guitarists such as Bernth, Chris Buck and Mateus Asato have built enormous audiences in a world where social media and online content can be as important to a guitarist's profile as being part of a chart-dominating band.

In many ways, these people are the new rockstars.

A young guitarist can discover a player on YouTube or social media and become fascinated by their playing, their sound, their technique and eventually the equipment they're using.

But something else is happening at the same time.

The old rockstars haven't gone anywhere either!

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Every Era of Music Now Exists at the Same Time

We often hear that there aren't as many huge guitar bands breaking through anymore.

There is some truth in that.

But we're also living in the streaming era, and that has completely changed what “old music” means.

Virtually the entire history of recorded popular music is sitting in everyone's pocket.

A teenager doesn't have to wait for somebody to introduce them to a record from 1991. They can discover Nirvana today just as easily as they can discover an artist who released a song last Friday.

And we see the effects of that.

Something like the Jazzmaster becomes popular with younger players again. Older bands find entirely new audiences. A guitar appears in a music video, a YouTube recommendation or a social media clip, and somebody walks into the shop wanting something similar.

So while we might have fewer individual guitar bands completely dominating popular culture, guitarists arguably have access to more musical influences than any generation before them.

A player starting today can be influenced simultaneously by a guitarist from the 1960s, a band from the 1990s and somebody who built their audience on YouTube three years ago.

That's a very different landscape.

It doesn't necessarily look like the old guitar industry.

But that doesn't mean there isn't a guitar culture.

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And Then There's AI

It's impossible to talk about the future of music in 2026 without somebody eventually mentioning AI.

In fact, somebody brought it up in the shop earlier today.

There are understandable concerns about what generative AI means for musicians, songwriters, producers and the wider music industry. We're certainly not qualified to predict where all of that ends up.

But when we think about the people who actually come through our door, we're not particularly concerned about AI causing people to stop playing guitar.

Because that seems to misunderstand why a lot of our customers play in the first place.

A professional guitarist isn't looking for the quickest possible way to generate three minutes of audio.

Neither is the collector who's wanted a particular guitar for fifteen years.

Neither is the teenager obsessed with learning a song from a real band, with real, relatable musicians they discovered online.

Neither is the tone chaser trying to find that sound.

And neither is the person sitting on the sofa with a guitar after work because playing for an hour helps them switch off.

For those people, making music isn't simply about obtaining the finished product via the quickest route possible. Those people exist, but they're not the people we see and speak to every day.

The act of doing it is the point.

Technology may completely change how music is made, distributed and consumed. It probably will.

But people have always enjoyed physically making music, and from what we're seeing, they still do. And guitar is still a huge part of that.

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The Physical Shop Still Matters Too

For us, having a physical shop remains incredibly important.

It's where customer relationships are built.

It's where somebody can pick up a guitar, feel it, hear it and decide whether there's actually a connection with it, ask questions about it and get an honest review, rather than making that decision from specifications, photographs and online forums.

It's where a first-time buyer can timidly admit they don't really know what they're looking for and ask for advice, and then leave feeling like they've made an educated purchase.

And it's where people can simply browse, talk about guitars and see what's turned up this week.

That community and trust has become a vital part of what The Woodshed is.

Perhaps that's part of the future of independent retail too. We're using the tools of the modern world to reach more people and make ourselves visible, while holding on to the best parts of the traditional retail experience: personal service, genuine expertise and the chance to see, hear and feel an instrument before you buy it.

As musicians have gained the tools to build careers and audiences independently, small businesses have gained many of the same advantages. We can build our own audience, market our own stock and reach customers directly without needing to be a huge national operation.

There may be less room than there once was for enormous, impersonal retail operations trying to compete purely on volume and price.

But perhaps that creates more room for smaller specialists that can offer something personal. That may be why our experience doesn't seem to reflect some of the wider concerns being expressed about the industry.

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So, Is Guitar Dying?

We should probably finish with an enormous caveat.

We've only been doing this for two and a half years.

Someone who's spent thirty or forty years in the guitar industry has a point of reference that we simply don't have.

Maybe they remember periods when guitar shops were considerably busier. Maybe the overall market really has contracted significantly. Maybe we've somehow managed to find our feet in an industry that's slowly getting smaller.

We're new enough to admit that we don't know.

All we can really tell you is what it feels like from where we're standing.

And from here, it doesn't feel like an instrument that's disappearing.

We see musicians, collectors, hobbyists, online guitarists, teenagers, parents and complete beginners continuing to engage with guitars in different ways.

The guitar may not occupy exactly the same place in popular culture that it once did.

The industry around it may be changing too, but changing isn't the same thing as dying.

Two and a half years ago, we had virtually no idea what to expect when we stepped into this industry.

Today, The Woodshed and our workshop keep us busy, people keep bringing us interesting instruments, and — most importantly — people keep coming back.

We're incredibly grateful for that.

And whatever happens to the wider guitar industry from here, we're very glad to be a small part of it.