Sunday, November 30. 2008The strategy is right...
I’ve commented in this blog before about the marketing structure of the piano industry and how much the average piano price is inflated by factors independent of the manufacturing process. To quote from a previous post, “The cost of a Stuart piano accurately reflects production, not marketing, advertising or retailing costs.”
I should know. I bought one. I, like others of my ilk, paid the full price for the piano. It was not discounted in any way. So it was of interest when I came across a discussion of piano pricing on the Pianoworld fora over the last couple of days. I think that readers will have some idea of my overall view on these fora from previous posts. Particularly when it comes to discussion of high-end pianos like the Stuart, the overall signal-to-noise ratio is generally very low. This is basically due to the number of people who have a specific axe to grind about particular brands, and also the number of professional dealers and technicians who have their own commercial imperatives when it comes to speaking their mind in a public forum, no matter how knowledgeable and informative they may be in matters of a more general nature. Even so, there was one post which I thought clearly enunciated a number of relevant factors, and I quote (OK, selectively but not detrimentally) here. “It is been a widely recognised industry standard for decades that piano stores need to average somewhere around 40% gross margin to survive and grow.” This may even be conservative, particularly when it comes to high-end pianos, which ‘move’ much more slowly and erratically than what might be called the ‘lower-end’ brands. Any attempt to substantially discount these high-end pianos essentially means that the dealer is subsidising these and therefore cannibalising his higher profit stock, which raises the question as to why he or she has those high end stock in the first place. “There is a very strident and vocal contingent in PW that would love nothing better than to drive every piano dealer from the planet. They believe it is their charge to make sure that every sale of a new piano goes down at as close to wholesale cost (or below) as possible. To them a retailer making a profit is an obscenity.” This, to me, is rather a jaundiced view, but it does illustrate the opposite end of the scale, namely who needs the middleman? What is the purpose of having one, and what value do they add? Well, it’s not so much that as what the public expects from them. • Highly visible and convenient (often freeway) locations • Acres of pianos to select from • Multiple units of the same model and finish to select from • All instrument in perfect tune and preparation • Back up stock to be delivered “in the box.” • Proper and conducive acoustic environments • Donations of free recital space or free loaned instruments for recitals and concerts. • The freedom to come in a play for hours on end, even pounding tunings askew. • Educational opportunities on site • Displays of sheet music, books, and software • Extended evening, weekend, and even holiday hours • Clever and frequently updated websites • Yellow page ads • Print ads in major papers, radio, and even local TV • Free tuning(s) post delivery • Free delivery (even same day) … all of which of course costs money. The problem is that potential piano buyers expect the same service features as other retail goods, for example, cars. The first four points above can relate to this and many other industries as well as the music industry. Even worse is the pricing structure offered by some manufacturers, which not unnaturally give the dealer a better deal for more pianos. An example is: “Here is an example of prices for a 6' grand: (prices have been altered slightly to protect company). These prices are almost a year old. Retail: $27,100 Wholesale: $13,540 Consortium: $9,024 So you can see the retail price is nearly 3 times the dealer price. This allows dealers to mark the piano up 100% and still sell it for what appears to be 1/3rd off retail.” So the actual production cost of many of these pianos may be as low as (or lower than) 50% of the retail cost. Take into account transport, tuning, advertising, promotions etc and you will begin to understand that the total cost of providing a piano to the door of the purchaser by the dealer is considerably higher (double or more in many cases) than the wholesale cost ex factory. What would happen if Stuart pianos were sold via this structure? • What impression does discounting a high-end piano (of whichever brand) have on the brand image? Not a positive one, certainly. • What effect does it have on the resale value? Not a positive one, certainly. Now of course, high-end pianos may not attract the same percentages, but the principle still holds. “It seems like the same old game: Jack the price way up so you can give a great discount and still make money. It's always telling that as you start going up the chain of piano quality, the discounts get smaller.” Has anyone noticed that the ‘street price’ of much music gear is invariably much lower thn the RRP? Hmmm… That is why Stuart & Sons eschew the dealership mechanism. 1) Stuart pianos are normally sold through the factory 2) People who buy them don’t need the fancy services and choices afforded by dealers who have to add substantially to the cost of the piano just to keep themselves in business and to provide facilities for those who want their hands held during the purchasing process. 3) Pianos and pianists are not static but adjust to each other over a period of time (I know that for a fact). The trick is to trust the brand, its quality and reputation. 4) Whilst it may seem that one pays premium prices for Stuart pianos, in fact the price reflects virtually 100% manufacturing costs and in fact is very good value when one compares these pianos against other brands which are still forced to submit to the old way of doing things. The result is the best of all worlds. • The challenge to adapt and reinvent. • A piano of hand crafted quality which invariably exceeds all expectations of it • A piano which does not feed the finances of those people who are not relevant to the design and manufacturing process • A piano which, as an investment, keeps its value and indeed appreciates over time I keep saying that you cannot say that about any other brand of piano. The strategy is right. If ‘high-end’ pianos need to have dealers to sell them, then I would postulate that they’re not really high-end at all. Another dastardly marketing trick exposed. Saturday, November 29. 2008We nailed it ...
I must admit there is a good feeling to participating in a function which is successful in raising over $20,000 for homeless children in Vietnam. Last night, our little impromptu band (various saxophones, keyboard, drums and bass) did a very good job in playing for around 700 people at the beginning of the night. All of our rehearsals came good in the end, and overall our sound had a very professional feel about it and I must admit I had a good time. The function was very well organised, and I even ran into a few old friends that I hadn’t seen for a while. Small world.
I was particularly pleased about David’s performance and he handled the stresses and strains of lead instrumentalist very well. He was able to use a professional wireless microphone which clipped onto the bell of the saxophones, and the sound (once we got the tonal balance right) was very good. His only hiccup came when the photographer for the night shined a very strong spotlight in his face but then again that sort of thing would distract anyone… It’s amazing how much music gear we have, and how much we needed to take for the occasion – keyboard + stand, saxophones, music stands, cables, computer (David did all of the audiovisual productions as well) and a great number of odds and ends. Fortunately we didn’t need the keyboard amplifier, microphones, microphone stands, mixer etc otherwise we would have needed to hire a truck. I learnt a few things about our family members too. I never knew my delightful niece could shimmy like that – I wonder how much the photographs are worth. So now back to normalcy, at least once we’ve unpacked the car. On the Stuart front, things are fairly quiet, although the same thing cannot be said about some of the noise I’m making at the moment. The good thing is that my eye has settled down well and I suspect that my appointment with my specialist this week will be one of the ‘looks good, see you in three months’ type of appointment which most surgeons find is the best kind. Now perhaps I can settle down a bit and get some practice done. Saturday, November 22. 2008
Musical instruments expand to fill ... Posted by Dr Christopher Moore
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20:54
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… and I was reminded about this general, obvious but totally conjectural and unproven principle today when we held a full rehearsal for our playing at the fundraising function I mentioned previously.
So, all in all, we had the following in my music room. • 1 x Stuart & Sons 2.2 metre grand piano • 1 x Kurzweil SP2X electronic keyboard + Behringer acoustic instrument amplifier • 1 x Professional Drum Kit (acoustic of course) • 1 x Bass Guitar + Bass amplifier • 1 x Yanagisawa 910 soprano saxophone • 1 x Temby Alto saxophone • 1 x Temby Tenor saxophone And, of course, four people and music stands etc. We didn’t make that much noise, really. In fact things went off very well and I’m confident we will make a good impression when we play. Steve on drums is a very experienced musician (OK, so some people will demur at my classing drums as musical instruments but I’m being polite here) and he and I are quite used to large audiences, we are anticipating between 650-700 people being there. But this will be the biggest audience David has played to, and given his saxophones will be the lead instrument on most of the songs there will be a lot of pressure on him in that regard. But I’ve been really pleased (and impressed) with how he’s handling all of this and he will come out of it a much better and more confident musician than before, and that cannot be anything but a good thing. I must admit, I’m enjoying it too. It’s good to get back into a group environment again, if only for a short time. On the Stuart front, things are progressing well, and my playing (as long as I pick pieces that don’t require too much acrobatics) is sounding OK, at least to my ears. I’m exploring much more modern repertoire these days, and whilst I’m having problems understanding the musical languages of many of the composers, there are some which I’m storing away for future examination when I have more time. More of that anon. Oh, yes … my music room has much more space in it now. Tuesday, November 18. 2008
The Information Age and the Quality ... Posted by Dr Christopher Moore
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23:25
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Reporter John Lawton, speaking to the American Association of Broadcast Journalists in 1995 said "The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion." I suspect that there are two main reasons for this.
1) It has allowed more people (including myself I must admit) to contribute information 2) There are very few checks and balances on the information being disseminated. Now, of course, both of these conditions apply to this blog, and so it can be argued that Lawton’s quote applies to me equally if not more so to anyone else. But in practice much of what I write either is the result of my direct experience with the Stuart piano (and therefore can be tested in the Hume’s Fork sense) or else based upon my many conversations with people with intimate and accurate knowledge and experience with the Stuart piano. Which makes it all the more galling when this gem of wisdom is published on the internet: “Wow! I almost never visit piano manufacturer web sites. Nor do I read brochures. It occurred to me early on that 1) all pianos are much the same 2) the only way you can differentiate is to play them. The marketing stuff is mostly either obvious or nonsense!” a) if you don’t visit websites or read brochures how do you know about the pianos on offer – even if you consider the information contained therein to be ‘crap’ at least you know the piano exists. b) All pianos are not ‘much the same’. All right, they have cases, strings, keyboards, pedals etc etc but this statement has as much truth and sense in it as saying all cars are the same because they all have engines, seats and a steering wheel. As I and many others have opined, the Stuart piano is certainly and quite demonstratively not the same as any other. c) If all pianos are ‘much the same’ how can you differentiate them? And, if you can differentiate them, surely they’re not ‘much the same’ no matter how you define the word ‘much’? d) It is easy to recognise nonsense in ‘Marketing stuff’. Many manufacturers rely heavily these days on their websites to generate interest in their products, and Stuart & Sons are no different and indeed perhaps more than any other manufacturer place significant emphasis on the website to disseminate quality and factual information about the pianos. To dismiss all ‘marketing stuff’ in this way is errant nonsense. Indeed, some people have commented that they consider the Stuart website to be best of all of them in those terms. It is a truism that a speculative conjecture made in a post in a forum or other mechanism on the net soon becomes accepted wisdom in following posts made by people who have absolutely no clue about what they are talking abut. And that includes the original poster as well. If this blog is seen to avoid that trap, then the effort I put into this will not be in vain. Monday, November 17. 2008Now where were we up to?...
My eye got a YACBOH last week (≡ Yet Another Clean Bill Of Health) and so far things are looking up, another pun intended. I have another lens in my glasses for my left eye and this one as I expected is decidedly thinner than the last one. My vision is still a bit wavy, but by and large is better than it was.
My brain appears to have decided on its own accord that it prefers the right eye to the left, and I’m finding particularly when I play the piano that I’m not getting the left eye interfering nearly as much as it did before the latest operation – which I suspect is a good thing. As a result my piano playing is actually quite good and I’m getting more and more confident that I can get back to somewhere near my previous standard which will mean I’m in a good position to ‘finally’ do some recording. I’ll be helping my son do some music for a function in two weeks time to help raise money for homeless Vietnamese children, and so have been busily arranging various pieces both familiar and unfamiliar to play on that occasion. David is getting quite good now (despite a lack of practice time for him due to pressure of work) on the saxophone, and we’ve come up with a good range of songs for his soprano, alto and tenor instruments and the sounds he is producing are actually getting to be quite professional, although he would be the first to admit he has a long way to go to really become fluent with the instruments. Nonentheless he is showing good improvisational skills and also has the unteachable knack of being able to recover from wrong notes – something that his father has had much experience in doing for many years now. We’ve had a good time together working through the programme, and the Stuart piano has been quite superb in its ability to blend in with the saxophones without overpowering them in any way, even when played hard. I began to think about how I could transport the piano to our function but having seen the stage we will be on I’m not sure that the stage is big enough… We were playing together at a mass last Sunday, and I began to realise that my venerable KS32 keyboard just wasn’t good enough any more as a performance instrument. Given the professional saxophones that David has, my brother-in-law’s drum kit (he plays professionally too) and the importance of the occasion (we are expecting between 600 and 700 people to attend) I knew that I had to ‘up the ante’ as it were if I was to produce an appropriate keyboard sound and feel when we played. So I have acquired a new keyboard – an 88 note Kurzweil SP2X. Kurzweil have always had an excellent reputation for the quality of their keyboard sounds and having kept tabs on keyboards for quite a while in anticipation of having to upgrade this was the one I thought would be the best value for money – and so it proved. Very nice piano sounds, decent effects and although it doesn’t have the full MIDI sound set, I don’t really need all of those and if I do I can always hook the keyboard up to my notebook computer anyway. I bought the keyboard locally and got what was really a very good deal considering the current exchange rate of the $Aus. So that’s one problem solved – albeit a fairly quick decision when I actually made it, but as I intimated one that I had been thinking about and doing my research on for quite a while. But… • Does it sound like a Stuart? No. • Does it play like a Stuart? No. • Does the treble ring like a Stuart? No, of course not. No electronic instrument I’ve come across can get close – but for my purposes the Kurzweil doesn’t need to. Incidentally, I was also able at the same time to reacquaint myself with some nice-looking Bechstein grand pianos. • Did they sound like a Stuart? No. • Did they play like a Stuart? No. • Did the treble ring like a Stuart? No. Nonethless, let me not sound rude and stupid here. They were very good quality pianos – even though I thought the 190cm one was much better than the 220cm one that was there – and it was half the price too, but that might just be a voicing problem. It just goes to show how good the Stuart piano really is. Wednesday, November 5. 2008
Today is an important anniversary… Posted by Dr Christopher Moore
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08:56
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…inasmuch as my family arrived in Sydney on the SS Orion fifty years ago today, after a six week voyage from England that included Gibraltar, Naples, Port Said, Aden (through the Suez Canal), Colombo, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and finally Sydney. Today is also the traditional Guy Fawkes’ day in England – I’m not sure that the two events are related in any way.
I remember my first day in Sydney, walking across Glebe Island bridge when it still had traffic on it, and wondering what all the strange cars were (they were called Holden, actually). It was a few months later having settled into our home at Cronulla when I started learning piano – my first piano was an old upright which we brought out from England with us because we couldn’t sell it, and was placed strategically in our garage so that no-one could hear me. It ended up in a scout hall in Cronulla, I seem to remember. I suppose it’s impossible at that early age to imagine where one will end up but overall I’m really grateful for my musical experiences as I was growing up – I was the school choir accompanist at the age of ten and have always been a good accompanist since then – I learnt to listen and anticipate, both skills absolutely essential as an accompanist. I’ve played many types of music in many different places with many different people over the years but my roots have always been in classical music and that is why my adventures with the Stuart piano have been so valuable to me, because at my age you don’t normally get an opportunity to reinvent what one has done over a long period of time, and, quite possibly, got into a rut from which it is very difficult to extract yourself. But that is what has happened, and now that my eye is hopefully OK for the long term (it received a clean bill of health yesterday) it’s time both to reflect on the past fifty years and to plan for the next fifty. There are a number of ideas that have been floating around in my mind for a while now, and whilst I have the opportunity it’s an ideal time to further those and see where they may lead. I’m certainly continually looking for more pieces to explore the sonorities of the piano and recording these and the others I already have secreted away will become more of a priority over the coming weeks. Sunday, November 2. 2008
I don’t normally read newspapers… Posted by Dr Christopher Moore
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14:17
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…at least not the hardcopy variety since I find that the internet provides me with quite sufficient bad news these days, but this article in the Australian in September caught my eye.
Objects of desire : Plastic banknotes, a funky shoe ... Vogue Living editor David Clark nominates 20 triumphs of Australian design from the past 20 years. … of which number nine is the Stuart piano, and I quote: “There are only 50 in the world, they take a year to make, and cost up to $200,000 each. They’re made in a small workshop in a converted church in the centre of Newcastle, but the beautifully crafted Stuart piano has reinvented piano technology. Wayne Stuart felt intuitively that piano design, which hadn’t changed since the 19th century, could be improved. His innovation was to alter the way the strings attach to the soundboard. Traditional pianos clamp the string to the soundboard horizontally, causing the sound to disharmonise and decay. Stuart’s invention keeps the string clamped vertically; that is, in the same plane as it is struck. The result is a constant vibration that produces a more dynamic range, longer sustain and greater clarity. He also added more keys and an extra pedal. Stuart’s new sound aesthetic has technicians and artists around the world in raptures.” I’m not so sure about the converted church bit, although I quite understand that music is a religion to many people. The agraffe of course is not the only technical innovation that Wayne has introduced – there are many, but it certainly seems as though it is the critical advance around which all of the others are built, resulting in the piano as I know it today. It’s particularly interesting that it is an editor of Vogue who made the choice – I’ve always felt that a piano has to be the ‘complete’ package as it were, both acoustically and visually and there’s no doubt that the piano looks as plays like a million dollars (current exchange rates notwithstanding). Despite this, there still seems to be a considerable dead weight or inertia towards any ‘advances’ in pianoforte technology that upset the staid old status quo of 100 year old music being played on 100 year old (design-wise) pianos. I am slowly and carefully coming back to playing the piano again after my last operation and for some reason what I’m hearing is different to what I was hearing before the operation – there is a sensitivity in the sound and a certain control in the fingers that I haven’t experienced before. This applies not only to ‘modern’ classical music but also to the classical and romantic repertoire that I’ve been working on for a while now. I don’t know the reason for this – it just seems that my feedback channel between the ears and fingers is working somewhat better than before. Of course I have no way of knowing objectively if this is the case – the feeling is totally subjective but I do know that when I’m feeling comfortable at the piano (and I do now) then something is going right. The piano is still in very good tune after six months of abuse, the action is fine and the touch on the keys feels both sensitive and sure at the same time. I’m also totally used to the pedals of course, and I’m finding that I don’t need to think about my use of the dolce and una corda pedals nearly so much as I used to. So I’m now in a position to start on the recordings. Should be difficult, frustrating, annoying and fun. After all, that’s one of reasons I got the piano in the first place. |
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