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Study: Half of the new guitar players are women
When it comes to the picture of young guitar players, most will still imagine a teenager boy who tries in his closed room, for example, on “Seven Nation Army”.
However, this idea is apparently distorted: half of all new guitars are women. This emerges from a representative study commissioned by the brand leader Fender, who interviewed buyers both in the UK and the USA. The examination does not list the age of the respondents in detail, but it is especially young women who map 50 percent of all first buyers.
“The fact that 50 percent of all new guitar buyers in Great Britain are very surprised by the UK team. But that is identical to what is happening in America,” Fender boss Andy Mooney concluded against that American Rolling Stone.
At first one would have thought that the high female number of buyers would be on a so-called “Taylor Swift factor”, according to the managing director. “But that’s actually wrong. Taylor has developed and plays less guitar on stage than before. But young women still achieve 50 percent of the new guitar purchases”. The phenomenon is therefore in the long term and would happen worldwide.
A very bizarre knowledge, women such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe or Joan Jett played a formative role in pop cultural development at an early stage. The musicians were simply not taken seriously by Fender and Co.
Female guitar players are not a novelty
Although guitar music no longer dominates the charts and some critics repeatedly conjure up the death of the guitar, the market for instruments has been growing again for several years. At the same time, a generation of young guitar musicians has gained a lot of attention in recent years – from Julien Baker to Tash Sultana to St. Vincent. Artists are increasingly in the foreground.
Fender has also taken steps since 2016 to address the female target group more clearly, which was previously largely ignored by the brand. For example, the indie band Warpaint carried out a campaign with Fender. For Music Man, St. Vincent has designed a model that is easier to use for both women and men.
However, Andy Mooney’s statements show that the way to take women in pop music as seriously as their male colleagues is still quite long.