The day the music died

Business Insider

20-05-2025

Alex Mundo gets a little worked up at the idea of tariffs making the instruments at his music store more expensive, especially for beginners. "There's going to be a lot of kids now who aren't going to be able to get their stuff, aren't going to be able to become musicians," he says. "It's already becoming very cost-prohibitive as it is."
Mundo is a jack-of-all-trades within one trade: music. He spent more than a decade in sales and retail management, mainly at Sam Ash Music, and now works as a guitar technician at a retailer on Long Island, New York. He also moonlights as an audio engineer and plays in a band of his own. He's not optimistic about the impact of President Donald Trump's tariffs on the industry he's dedicated his life to. For families looking to get their kids into music, tariffs mean starter instruments may become tougher to afford. Advancing musicians may have a harder time accessing higher-quality instruments and gear as they progress. Sellers are feeling the pressure on their margins, too. Even professional and semiprofessional musicians aren't immune.
"If my gear is weak and lame, I don't get paid the checks that I need to get paid," says Mundo, who makes about one-quarter of his income from gigging. "I mean, musicians are broke. We need cheap things."
In music, like in many arenas, tariffs stand to make affordable things harder to come by — even the stuff that says "Made in the USA."
"If you walk to any music store, big box or mom-and-pop, right now and grab anything off the wall, it'll either say Taiwan or China on it, maybe Indonesia on some guitars," Mundo says. "Even when you get to the American-made stuff, I always have to ask, where are they getting the parts?"
The US music products industry is relatively small, worth about $20 billion in sales a year. Music may be a luxury, but it's profoundly impactful on our economy and collective psyche. The music industry generates billions of dollars in economic activity each year (see: Taylor Swift). It's one of America's greatest cultural exports. Music programs are a fixture in American schools. Music keeps us entertained and allows us to express ourselves and make connections. Not to be too soft, but it's one of those things that makes life a bit more worth living.
"There are geopolitical trade issues much bigger than clarinets out there in the world, I understand that," says John Mlynczak, the president and CEO of the National Association of Music Merchants. "But at the same time, music making is one of the most universally joyous, peaceful, uniting art forms since the dawn of time."
The biggest exporter of musical instruments and parts to the US is — surprise, surprise — China. It accounted for about $560 million in imports in 2024, followed by Indonesia and Japan at $166 million, with Mexico and Taiwan just behind. So when Trump initially put a 145% tariff on imports from China (though he's since temporarily reduced that to 30%) along with a blanket 10% tariff on imports globally, it caused quite a lot of heartburn in the industry. The worldwide nature of Trump's trade actions is particularly worrisome because, given the number of instruments and parts made abroad, music manufacturers and retailers have nowhere to hide.
Musicians are broke. We need cheap things.
Cullen Hendrix, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, recently crunched the numbers on instruments and tariffs. He found that orchestral strings (think violins and cellos) and brasswinds (trumpets and tubas) would be among the instruments hard hit, along with electronic keyboards and electric guitars and basses.
"While there will be escalating costs across a range of musical instruments, the most acute effects are going to be on the entry-level instruments, the ones that are the cheapest and therefore the most accessible to student musicians and, in particular, school music programs," he says. He worries about what it means for the future: "You don't get adult serious hobbyist musicians like myself, for instance, who spend thousands of dollars on musical equipment per year, if they never got an instrument in their hands in the first place."
About two-thirds of Americans in a 2022 YouGov survey said they had learned to play an instrument at some point in their lives. Most, of course, won't become the next John Mayer or Yo-Yo Ma or Slash, or play in Beyoncé's band, but learning to play an instrument is good for the brain. It helps with coordination, motor skills, and creativity. On the list of hobbies, it's a pretty healthy one.
The crux of Vermont Violins' business is instrument rentals, largely to students, and about 1,300 of the business' 1,500 loaners are imported from overseas. Its three primary manufacturers are in China, and all of them are having stock issues and raising their prices. Vermont Violins is limited on how much more it can charge customers in response — it doesn't want to price people out of playing, and its larger competitors have more wiggle room on margins. So to get ahead of prospective price increases, it just bought about $125,000 of instruments in one shot.
"We essentially did an entire year's worth of purchasing in one order," says Nate Webster, a shop manager at the company. It's borrowing from the future to survive in the present.
Stephanie Pensa helps run her dad's guitar shops, called Rudy's Music. The operation is fairly small: one location in Scarsdale, New York, and another in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. She worries this is going to be the "last hoorah" of reasonable price points. While some manufacturers are trying to absorb import costs, increases are inevitably starting to come through. One Chinese manufacturer Pensa works with has paused sending guitars to the US altogether, so all that's available is the dwindling inventory that's already warehoused stateside. The other day, Pensa was shocked to see that a supplier had raised the price of power adapters she usually paid about $8 for to $18.50.
Customers have started to inquire about tariffs and price increases, and she's generally happy to explain what's going on so people don't think it's just "this small business that got greedy." She can tell customers are uneasy — Rudy's has seen an uptick in inquiries from people looking to sell their guitars, too. "There is a little bit of a feeling of, 'We should buy a lot right now and have it,' but then there is a little bit of a fear if people are sort of hanging onto their money a little more," she says. "It's a very iffy time."
manufacturing to move back to the US. It's a heavy lift in a lot of industries — nobody can really snap their fingers and build a factory overnight and then recruit people to work it. In music, there are some particularities that make the proposal perhaps even more daunting.
Making all the instruments stateside, with labor costs and revamped supply chains, would be so expensive that the price of lower-end items would skyrocket. That would hurt the entire pipeline, since many American companies manufacture their starter items abroad to keep the price points low before graduating people to more expensive, domestically made specialty equipment.
"A top-level brand wants that customer to want that top-level product, but you want to start and build brand loyalty," Mlynczak from NAMM says. "So you might have products that are the top level made in the US, but you might rely on products from other countries at that entry level."
Many of Fender's budget guitars and their parts are made in Indonesia and China. Some of the nicer options are assembled just over the border, in Mexico.
It's not easy to swap parts and materials for domestic options. Certain woods that produce certain sounds come from certain places. The same goes for rare earth metals, such as neodymium, which is used in microphones and primarily mined in China. Some instruments, culturally and historically, have belonged to specific countries. If you want a high-end string instrument, such as a violin or a cello, you'll lean toward a more "authentic" version from Italy or Germany. Or, for an electric guitar, you'll want something American. Instrument making is highly specialized, and it requires customized machinery and skillsets.
It's impossible to figure out what's being tariffed at any given time.
Vermont Violins has begun to invest in its own manufacturing capacity in recent years, ostensibly doing the very thing that Trump wants to happen. It makes about 100 instruments a year right now, and it's taken years of effort to get to that point. Kathy Reilly, who owns the store with her husband, estimates it took them three to five years to perfect the model — developing supply chains, sourcing the wood, purchasing equipment, and teaching people how to do the work. "You've got to practice. You've got to make all your mistakes," Reilly says.
Now, instead of investing more in its manufacturing operation, the tariffs have forced Vermont Violins to divert resources to manage the chaos of the moment. It's impossible to figure out what's being tariffed at any given time; handle currency fluctuations, partner relationships, and vendor price changes; and still try to build.
"We were trying to do what they wanted everybody to do," Reilly says. "But now we just got the bottom pulled out from under us."
Many instruments and equipment that are assembled in the US still have foreign parts, meaning their makers can't avoid tariffs, either.
The guitar effects pedals Electro-Harmonix is known for are generally assembled in New York City. Its three main components — the circuit board, chassis, and packing carton — are sourced from China and other countries in Asia. Mike Matthews, Electro-Harmonix's founder, who's been in the business since 1968, tells me some of his competitors assemble offshore, but it's a "huge risk" he won't take. "If there's a screw-up, and there are screw-ups, then you can get killed," he says.
Matthews hasn't had to raise prices yet — he's built up his stock in recent years, concerned about runaway inflation. But eventually, he'll have to act. "We will do the right, prudent thing at the right time," he says.
This isn't Matthews' first rodeo with tariffs in recent history. Electro-Harmonix also manufactures vacuum tubes — think old-school versions of microchips for equipment such as amps. It makes the equipment in Russia and had to hike prices after the US put a 35% tariff on imports from the country in 2022. "We're constantly battling with that," he says. While the vacuum tubes are still a significant part of his business, given how few competitors there are in the space, sales have fallen because of the "extreme, higher cost."
Much of the conversation around tariffs has focused on their impact on big industries, such as automotives and electronics, and the costs and merits of moving their manufacturing to the US. On the other end of the spectrum, the White House has framed tariffs as a way to wean Americans off cheap, disposable stuff. Consumers, in turn, are panic-buying cars and wondering whether they'll have to bid farewell to Shein and Temu. In the tariff landscape, musical instruments occupy a middle ground that often goes overlooked: not big enough to weigh heavily on policy (or the discourse), not small enough to be shrugged off as another trivial consumer indulgence.
There's no Tim Cook of guitars to charm Trump into granting an exception for strings and tuning pegs.
Most instrument makers, even recognizable names, are relatively small firms. They don't have extensive logistics teams or armies of fancy lawyers to navigate a trade regime changing at this whipsaw pace. Nearly every manufacturer, retailer, and expert I spoke with for this story acknowledged that they're not entirely sure which tariffs are and aren't owed on any given day. NAMM provides resources for its members, but Mlynczak says he's still heard some say they just can't keep up.
The industry doesn't have the lobbying muscle behind it to make its case on getting more favorable trade arrangements. There's no Tim Cook of guitars to charm Trump into granting an exception for strings and tuning pegs. Gibson and Fender executives weren't sitting behind the president at his inauguration.
"The industry is not the automobile industry. It's not a giant industry. So most all the companies that make things in the musical instrument industry have to deal with the tariffs," Matthews says. "In general, when prices go up, total sales do come down."
Like most businesses and consumers, people in the instruments industry just want to know the drill on tariffs. The White House's version of " strategic uncertainty" is starting to feel pretty unstrategic at this point, and on the ground, it's making it very hard to strategize.
"Everyone looks at tariffs and says, 'Oh, well, if this costs more, that may cost more.' But we have to think about just supply chain disruption, small-business confusion, consumer confidence, all these little things that have hiccups," Mlynczak says.
Pensa from Rudy's says she's heard from sales reps at various companies that April — on the heels of " Liberation Day" — was terrible. "That was the height of, I think, the uncertainty," she says.
Instruments and equipment getting pricier or harder to get isn't the most important economic impact of tariffs. Obviously, someone not being able to afford groceries or a car to drive to and from work is different from a parent deciding not to get their kid a guitar for graduation. But music is woven into our cultural and social fabric. A trumpet or drum set is more than just an appliance.
"Musical instruments account for about one-tenth of 1% of the US trade deficit with China, but the cultural impact of musical instruments and the iconography around them is vast. If you think about famous musicians, many of them are kind of inseparable from the instrument they play," Hendrix of the Peterson Institute says.
We picture Slash with a Gibson Les Paul, Jimi Hendrix with his Fender Stratocaster, whether we know the exact names or brands of the instruments or not. But you never get a Slash or Jimi Hendrix if they don't get access to a guitar in the first place. The vast majority of people start out practicing with whatever they can get their hands on, and if tariffs make that harder, that's a challenge up and down the price point spectrum.
"It does kill the fire," Mundo says. "When something's completely out of your reach, how many times can you hear no before you're just like, screw this."