BOUTIQUE - Music Inc. Magazine

Brian Reardon
Monster Music
Levittown, n.Y.
114 I MUSIC INC. I JANUARY 2011
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Hopefully, we don’t have too much
post-holiday downtime. The music
lessons schedule is a little haphazard
for the week between Christmas
and New Year’s week, but we generally
are fairly brisk business-wise.
We focus on our lesson program.
The 30 days post-Christmas is second
only to September for new students.
This is a function of several simultaneous
factors, including those who received
new instruments from Santa and want to
learn how to play them and those who
received gift certificates for lessons and
want to redeem them. I like it when my
New Year’s resolution, which is always to
grow my lesson program, coincides with
the New Year’s resolutions of my customers:
to learn to play an instrument.
>>>
Chris Basile
South Jersey Music
Sewell, n.J.
We usually run a promotion
through January or February
where we give away a free guitar
for a three-month lesson sign-up.
The guitar we give away is usually
an entry-level acoustic guitar because
they are new students, and the retail or
MAP price is about $119–$129. We let
them bump it to an electric guitar, and
it is usually a Cort or Austin, which we
sell in the store for about $149, and that
would take you to a four-month lesson
plan. They sign up and pay for the threemonth
lesson plan in advance, where
we normally just charge them monthly,
and then we’d give them the free guitar.
>>>
Jeff Lee
Resurrection Drums
hollywood, Fla.
We are located in South Florida,
so anybody with any money
who wants to kiss the grandchildren
goodbye and happy New Year is on
a plane to South Florida. [The holiday
downtime] is totally different for us.
So when I order, I’m not ordering
just for Christmas. Sometimes,
we run into issues where if we don’t
preorder, we’ll find the manufacturers
are out of stuff into January, and
we just rock right on through.
>>>
Donovan Bankhead
Springfield Music
Springfield, Mo.
What do you do to
combat the post-
holiday downtime?
We have a very strong
educational department.
It’s a full-profit department,
and we actually
make money off of it, not
just rely on it for traffic.
During the holiday season,
we promote it to combat
post-holiday downtime.
Right now, we’re running
a promotion where,
if a customer buys an instrument
for a first-time
student, [the student] gets
lessons half-off for the first
month. It doesn’t matter
what instrument — it’s
anything that we teach lessons
on. If someone wants
to buy a kazoo and he was
going to take kazoo lessons,
we would honor that.
The idea behind it, of
course, is that it’s going to
give us traffic for the first
quarter, and if we do a good
job of making the lessons
exciting and successful,
[students] will hopefully
want to stay involved.
We do a bunch of summer
music camps and things
like that, so we hope that
once we get them in, we
can keep them in.
We will also start promoting
our programs right
now because one of the
things that we want to do
is hold a band and orchestra
camp. So in order to promote
that well, we need
to start on that now with
promotional materials, fliers,
posters, handouts and
e-mail blasts. We have to get
that information ready as
quickly as possible.
Promoting the lesson
program is the No. 1 thing
we do to get people in here
during the first quarter
because it is pretty slow
and the lesson program is
a profit center for us. It’s
now one of our largest departments
in-store.
We will also hold tax
promotions to get people
to spend their tax refunds
at our store, and sometimes,
we’ll do a tax-free holiday
during the tax rebate time.