Fender has rolled out a new lesson platform called Fender Play.
This is a response to the rapid decline of electric guitar sales over the last ten years. If things don't turn around pretty quickly for Fender, and the rest of the industry, a lot of firms will go under or suffer extreme contraction to the point where they're going to be hardly recognizable.
Here's why Play is not going to fill the void.
Play is an act of desperation cooked up by some old white men sitting around a conference table imagining that kids want what the old men want.
The ad starts off with a whiny young woman followed by some mansplaining .... and it devolves from there. It's all wrapped up in a multicultural corporate utopia of youngsters learning blues, rock, country, and pop: black kids learning Willie Nelson, lesbians chugging away at power chords, and so on, taught by cheerful robots. Hey, kids, learn grandpa's favorite songs from ZZ Top and The Stones!
The whole thing is just depressing. Everybody sitting around in solitude plinking away on their Teles and acoustics learning some riffs and G chords. Nothing social, nothing fun and exciting, just isolated atoms pressing down strings in their cells -- obeying the transcendental grandfather's need for ZZ Top covers.
Good luck, Fender, you're going to need it.
This is a response to the rapid decline of electric guitar sales over the last ten years. If things don't turn around pretty quickly for Fender, and the rest of the industry, a lot of firms will go under or suffer extreme contraction to the point where they're going to be hardly recognizable.
Here's why Play is not going to fill the void.
Play is an act of desperation cooked up by some old white men sitting around a conference table imagining that kids want what the old men want.
The ad starts off with a whiny young woman followed by some mansplaining .... and it devolves from there. It's all wrapped up in a multicultural corporate utopia of youngsters learning blues, rock, country, and pop: black kids learning Willie Nelson, lesbians chugging away at power chords, and so on, taught by cheerful robots. Hey, kids, learn grandpa's favorite songs from ZZ Top and The Stones!
The whole thing is just depressing. Everybody sitting around in solitude plinking away on their Teles and acoustics learning some riffs and G chords. Nothing social, nothing fun and exciting, just isolated atoms pressing down strings in their cells -- obeying the transcendental grandfather's need for ZZ Top covers.
Good luck, Fender, you're going to need it.