Happy Wednesday siblings, and I say that in the full knowledge that once again the world appears to be going to hell in a handcart. I have decided to spend the rest of the week not doomscrolling and instead will concentrate on finding wee pockets of joy; this being the only rational response to the enormous farrago of nonsense happening out there. You may wish to join me.
(Incidentally, any of you with kids who want a way of bringing Stuff to life for them might like to look at this striking image from Flightradar24 which came out this morning.)
Anyway, if you know me you know that one of the ways I keep myself at least within shouting distance of sane is through playing guitar, and any readers who watched the lang cat’s HomeGames series during the pandemic (remember that?) will have noticed that I’m a bit of a collector of guitars and associated kit.
Do you find yourself wondering what the correct number of guitars to own is? I’ve written about this before but it’s governed by a formula which is popularly believed to be n+1, where n is the number of guitars (bike people use this too) that you have currently. This isn’t entirely accurate. The correct number is actually n+ 1 only where that number is equal to d-1; d in this case being the number of guitars that will cause severe domestic disturbance.
I’m telling you all this because I’m a wee bit sad that three of the UK’s best music retailers – PMT, GAK and Bax – have recently closed their doors. PMT (no, it doesn’t stand for that, it stands for Play Music Today) just did so a few days ago and have sold all their stock off to Gear4Music who are mahoosive online retailers.
Anyway, of the dozen or so guitars I own, I only bought two online, and one of those was just because I actually had Covid and was bored. And a bit tipsy.
The funny thing is that the act of buying a musical instrument is a really experiential, physical process. I know within 30 seconds of picking up a guitar if I’ll get on well with it. I remember once being handed about three grand’s worth of Stratocaster in the Edinburgh GuitarGuitar, and it played (to me) like a shovel on the end of a poker. Awful. The guy handed me another one – same range, same wood, same pickups, and it was completely different. (I still bought a Tele because they’re just better.)
Anyone who’s ever tried a bunch of Les Pauls knows that two seemingly identical guitars can be radically different; partly because there is still some hand-making in full-fat Gibsons, partly because quality control isn’t necessarily all that and a bag of chips, but also because it’s just what happens.
My point here is that it’s all too easy to assume that a guitar is a commodity; something that anyone who’s heard “but you can’t possibly need so many, they all do the same thing” has already argued against. It’s not; it’s a thing that a player gets music out of by a process of physical touch. I can’t imagine buying a serious musical instrument without playing it first.
The comparison with financial planning is obvious; it’s experiential and happens in the room. You’ll only know if it’s right when you sit down and bash out a wee tune. Online can do a lot, but it can’t replace this, and that’s the argument for why the machines won’t replace humans for the act of financial planning (yes, I know some people profoundly disagree).
There’s something else in this though. This lovely industry of music shops – generally staffed by people who don’t earn much and do it because they properly love music – is heading into a barbell type market where the only retailers left are small specialists or massive discounters. In-betweeners; mid-size firms like PMT, GAK or Bax couldn’t fight on price, couldn’t be quirky like the little guys but most importantly didn’t do a good enough job in helping people understand why you should go in, spend a happy hour mucking around and then buy the instrument you actually like best rather than the one you went in to try. They burn up in the crucible of the way so many markets work now.
I guess, then, this is an Update in defence of mid-sized planning firms; those who have built or are trying to build a practice with some scale, a good experience for clients which means something to them, doubtless with online capabilities but also that crucial, ineffable real-world presence. These firms are of course being snaffled up at a rate of knots. It would be a shame if they disappeared completely.
The job on, as another massive PE firm takes another massive stake in another massive consolidator, is to work out if we actually want that mid-market to exist or not. And if we do then all sorts of things need to happen; one of which is that providers may need to look past pure, brute scale when handing out the deals.
Your music choice this week is in celebration of sunny weather coming up, glasses of nice stuff in the park, decompressing and also the memory of the rush I got when I worked out how to play this song all those years ago. Can you believe I’ve never done a Beatles song in the Update? Let’s put that right – enjoy Here Comes The Sun.
