Business

In a TikTok video from June, Charlene Kaye, an excellent guitarist and bass player, sits on a stool with an electric bass at a Guitar Center and plays Paul McCartney’s iconic riff from The Beatles’ “Come Together” — incorrectly. On purpose. Two men in flannel and sweatshirts quickly rush over to guitarsplain: “No, it’s bum, bum, ba, ba, DOO, bum.” “Yeah, there’s one other note.” “Higher.”
In this one-minute experiment, the artist and comedian demonstrated to her 71,400 followers how male guitarists often treat female guitarists, how music stores can be unexpected snake pits and why men have dominated the guitar market for decades. “I’m a millennial, so my haven after school was going to Guitar Center and playing all the guitars there for hours,” Kaye says. “I was a much worse guitar player back then, and I would always get looks from these dude-bros who were the gatekeepers of Blink-182 and John Mayer. I couldn’t be a girl in there without getting hit on or corrected.”

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But the guitar patriarchy is changing, Kaye says, and sales metrics in recent years bear her out. Guitar Center itself has been working, as the company’s vp of guitar merchandising Matthew Schneider puts it, to “make sure everybody’s treated nice.” During the pandemic, homebound would-be players shifted to purchasing new axes online, boosting industry sales and freeing women from having to interact with the so-called dude-bros in stores. According to the Fender Play app, 45% of new players in 2020 were female, a 15% increase from 2019. Last year, the number increased to 49%. “The growth is palpable and active,” says John Dolak of the National Association of Music Merchants.

Kaye acknowledges the 300-store Guitar Center, which she calls the “epicenter of white dude riffs,” has been improving its culture, including by spotlighting women players in catalogs and store windows. The retailer’s Hollywood store put on a splashy event in June to introduce Orianthi’s new Gibson SJ-200 and featured Joan Jett in TV ads and YouTube videos as a partner for the chain’s fall 2021 Guitar-A-Thon, among many other female-fronted events. In November, two months after singer Blu DeTiger became the first woman to collaborate with Fender on a signature bass, she posted a TikTok of an employee at Guitar Center, where she bought her first bass at age 7, helping her pull the instrument from the wall. “The store is for everybody, regardless of your skill level, regardless of your gender,” says Maria Brown, Guitar Center’s director of content, artists, events and social media. “It needs to be an open environment where it’s supportive for whatever you’re trying to check out and buy.”

For decades, the male-dominated guitar industry was much less inviting, female players say. Lzzy Hale, guitarist for hard-rock band Halestorm, recalls taking lessons at 16 from a male teacher, who told her mom afterwards, “I would love to teach your daughter, but traditionally, women don’t stick with it, so I don’t want to waste my time.” (Hale says her mom recalled years later that she dutifully “told him off.”) In the ’80s, when Sue Foley was starting her career playing biker bars, she says, “You’d just get dudes saying, ‘Show us your tits!’” But the veteran blues guitarist has older guitar-playing brothers and has never let such crude commentary bother her: “I always say, you’re going to get in the ring, you have to be ready for it. Don’t expect to get an easy ride. This is guitar. This is tough. It’s hard to play guitar, it hurts your fingers, there’s a lot of things about guitar that might trip up a girl who’s not used to that more rugged approach. You’ve got to be tough.”

The guitar industry, in general, has spent the last few years honoring women — and trying to attract them as customers. H.E.R. and Susan Tedeschi (Fender), St. Vincent (Ernie Ball) and Miranda Lambert (Gibson) are among the guitar heroines who’ve released signature models in recent years, and Gibson named Hale its first-ever brand ambassador in 2022. Dominating everything, as always, is guitarist Taylor Swift, whose “effect on society,” says Jim D’Addario, founder/board chairman of guitar strings company D’Addario, has been to see to it that “many more young ladies are picking up the guitar.”

According to Brian T. Majeski, principal at The Music Trades, which analyzes musical-instrument sales data, Swift-inspired female guitarists are part of a “wealth of anecdotal evidence indicating that numbers have been trending up the past decade.” NAMM’s Dolak adds, “Historically, the guitar-playing universe used to be dominated by men. However, these numbers have changed at a breakneck speed since the pandemic.”

Although the Music Trades Association projects 2025 global guitar sales to hit $19.9 billion, which would be an increase of 15.7% since the pandemic-boosted $17.2 billion in 2020, many in the industry fear revenue declines. “The industry is really kind of dormant, or actually declining 2% to 3% a year,” D’Addario says of musical instruments in general, explaining that guitar players who lose interest sell their instruments on eBay, where they compete with Fender and Gibson, rather than storing them forever in their basements and attics. Regarding guitars, Majeski adds, “The business is soft right now.”

So companies that make and sell guitars have emphasized women, in part for cultural and gender-equity reasons, but also in part to expand their business to a broader demographic. In 2022, Andy Mooney, Fender’s CEO, told Entrepreneur that the company experienced an uptick in guitar sales to women during the pandemic. “Women were buying guitars online because in the brick-and-mortar stores there was nobody to relate to, and they weren’t getting treated well,” he said at the time. Fender did not respond to interview requests for Mooney or other representatives, but the company has taken small steps to acknowledge women guitar players in recent years — like adding Tedeschi’s green model to its male-dominated signature collection in June. 

Gibson, too, has featured women in recent campaigns, including its G3 mentorship and scholarship program, whose participants include many women. On a broad level, the iconic company known for masculine players such as Led Zeppelin‘s Jimmy Page and The Who‘s Pete Townshend has been spelunking its history, focusing on unsung female Gibson players such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mary Ford, guitarist in a legendary ’40s duo with husband Les Paul. “When it comes to the guitar, men are expected to be good, and women aren’t expected to be good. That’s just been the way it is, for a long time,” says Emily Wolfe, a singer and guitarist who narrates an official Gibson video for the recent launch of Ford’s Les Paul Standard. “When you have a woman who’s really good at it, it’s like, ‘Yeah, we’ve been here for a long time — look at Mary Ford.’”

The concept of a pop superstar like Swift encouraging young women to pick up guitar is by no means new. Bonnie Raitt had this effect twice — first when she emerged as a folkie singer-guitarist in the early ’70s, then when she scored hits in the late ’80s. (Foley cites Jennifer Batten, Michael Jackson‘s lead guitarist, as a similar influencer for female players.) “The environment was always, ‘Men excel and women are stumbling along behind,’ but Bonnie Raitt was disproving every stereotype from day one,” says longtime blues guitarist Rory Block. “She was so dynamic and so strong, and I immediately said, ‘This is good, this is possible, women can do this.’ She paved the pathway for women — for me.”

But despite the influence of artists like Swift and the guitar industry’s appeals to female customers, social media has perhaps had the biggest impact on this sales demographic. Mallory Nees, senior social media manager for online musical-instrument retailer Reverb, says she took up guitar at age 11 in Whitewater, Wisc., where the local music store displayed posters exclusively of male stars. 

It took a move to Chicago, as an adult, for Nees to learn about female players like St. Vincent and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker. Today, she says, girls and women everywhere can purchase instruments on Reverb and “improve their technique through YouTube videos and TikTok videos and creators that they trust and this whole ecosystem exists online anonymously and is fundamentally judgment-free, which was definitively not the case when I was learning to play.”

Elizabeth Heidt, Gibson’s chief marketing officer, adds that many women see YouTube and Instagram as a “safe space” for guitar playing, compared to music stores, which carry an “intimidation factor.” 

“Those other spaces allow people the freedom to play, to share, to grow and see themselves,” she says. “That was a big shift.”

Hale explains the changing guitar culture a different way. “It was only a few short years ago I was playing festivals overseas, and I was the only woman on the bill,” she says. “We’re still losing some battles on the way, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”

“This is our music,” Hale adds. “We’re not playing rock music [and] we’re not playing guitar because our boyfriends think it’s hot. We’re not doing it because we’re trying to prove something that girls can do. We’re doing it because we want to have ownership over the music that we love. We want to rage.”