Please read everything before making a decision about this business proposal.
According to a 2022 Survey by the American Music Conference, 28% of U.S. families own a keyboard instrument and over 18 Million Americans play the piano. In 2021, there were about 332 million Americans. That leaves ~ 314 million people who don’t play the piano… just in the United States alone.
The average American family in 2021 was 3.13 people. That means there is an average of ~106 million families, of which ~76 million do not own a piano or keyboard. That’s a lot of potential sales for both lessons, pianos, and keyboards!
Keyboards are very inexpensive these days. They are lightweight, with battery powered options, and they never need expensive tuning like an acoustic piano. There are potentially 76 million families that could become customers. They just need a reason to buy one.
In the case of piano lessons, there are already ~30 million families who own a piano or keyboard. However, 12 million of the people in these families do not play a piano or keyboard. That’s an awful lot of potential customers.
What I’m getting at here is there is a huge reservoir of potential customers out there for both pianos, keyboards, and lessons. So what’s the problem here? Why are the percentages so low for keyboard ownership and playing? To make matters worse, nine out of ten kids quit piano lessons within a year. I can relate to that. I’m one of them.
Well, we could debate that subject until the end of time. But if you will indulge me for a moment, I’ll give you my nickel and dime take on it. The biggest obstacle these days is the internet with its myriad social platforms and their hypnotic hold on consumers at large. Except for comments, video games, or adding content, this all pretty much requires passive involvement in “absorbing” whatever is out there. Learning the piano requires active involvement which of course is the reason it can be so good for hand/eye coordination. However, the same cannot be necessarily said for your emotions and that mysterious entity we call the “soul”. Active learning of anything requires old world virtues like patience, practice, learning from mistakes, dedication, and most of all, self discipline. Quite the opposite of pretty much everything found on the internet or TV these days. The bridge one needs to cross from hand/eye coordination to gain access to love and obsession for learning and playing music is vast, shaky, and fraught with peril. Delayed gratification is the name of the game. No wonder so many people turn to drugs.
Well, that was a real downer, wasn’t it? Ok, so how do we get people to cross that infernal bridge without holding their hand every step of the way? I don’t claim to have all the answers here, but I do have some suggestions: If you want to improve all those sad statistics you must try something different. Radically different. Music after all, is not just about theory and reading music. Those are just means to an end. The real reason to play music is to capture the raw passion required to lose both yourself and the audience inside the musical experience you are creating. Music. Real music, does not have to be technically complex. It has to be REAL! It must come from the very bottom of your soul.
My lessons can complement what you already have. They provide a much shorter bridge to that place where every musician strives to be. They can help turn non-believers into believers. Think of them as training wheels for a bicycle. Some people don’t need training wheels, but the vast majority of people do. I worked very hard on my lessons to make sure that can happen. They focus on teaching the student how to play simple, timeless songs as easily as possible in as little time as possible. My lessons aren’t designed to help people master music. They are designed to help them believe in themselves and get a taste for that elusive feeling we call musicianship.
Please take some time to check out my site (downloadmusiclessons.com), see how my lessons work, and the philosophy behind them. It took me a lot of time and effort to figure out how to put these lessons together. I’ve done the work and am now ready to crank out even more songs. Here is my basic formula:
1) All songs are in the key of “C”.
2) I use animated lessons and the finger numbers method, i.e., the students learn all the finger numberings and these numbers show up on an animated keyboard at the correct time.
3) I teach right handed melodies that require only one finger at a time to play, no chords.
4) The melody is divided up into easy to learn sections and taught at half speed. After two successive sections are learned, they are combined together and so forth until the entire melody has been mastered.
5) Next, I teach them the left handed harmony which will include chords. This is first done by teaching them animated one note “harmonies” so they can master playing both hands together at the same time. At the end of this one note harmony is an online roadmap they can use to practice using both hands together.
6) They next add a second note to the harmony to generate a chord. Once this is mastered a third note is added followed by a fourth note in some cases.
I’m not saying my brand of lessons are right for everybody, but they could provide a segue to more formal lessons that include reading music. Worst case scenario? Millions more people learn to play the piano and enjoy it. Now wouldn’t that make the world a much better place?
Let’s talk about it.
drfrankmusic@outlook.com