Apologies for a bit of digression, but a reason why HN is worth getting hooked to is precisely comments like this. Perhaps, my excitement might be eccentric but someone correlating declining guitar sales to general billboard-100 trends is amazingly profound.
It is not profound. It is one of the first things that you should look for.
Outside of supplier issues, which are not mentioned in the article, the idea that the music landscape is changing and that is affecting the sales is straightforward. I don't want to discount the work that the grandparent post put into listening to the top 30 songs for a single HN comment, but the idea is more than reasonable, it is a clear choice.
On the grandparent comment, maybe we should look at YouTube or Spotify's lists of the top tracks as well. BB does take in the streaming and digital services for the calculation [0] but the YT tracks may be less skewed to the older set. Radio play is strongly associated with car drivers, an older cohort, while YT can be considered to be less skewed in that direction, though it has it's own problems like everything else.
Not to take away from the OP, but if you read the article, the two last paragraphs read:
"Detractors have predicted the death of the electric guitar for years, pointing to the rise of rap and electronic dance music on pop charts.
But Mooney isn't worried. More women are playing guitar these days, he said—something he credits largely to Taylor Swift—and Fender now sees as many women as men playing the acoustic guitar, if not the electric(...)"
This "profound correlation" is suggested in the article itself.
To be fair, pop music charts are rarely guitar driven. Even in the 90s where we had this big rock revival it was Mariah Carey, Michael Bolton, Madonna, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Boyz II Men, etc leading the charts most of the time. Remember, the Beatles were famously turned down in the early 60s because "Guitar groups are on their way out." Well, that was true as the charts had so few guitars and no one really saw 60's and 70's rock/folk/funk/psychedelia coming.
Rock definitely is less popular now in the charts, but its worth mentioning that a lot of guitar-styles tend to get eaten up the whole Indie/DIY scene, which still has prominent guitar-work and rock-based styles. Again, perhaps not as much as the 90s, but the analysis above seems much more damning than it needs to be.
I imagine Fender is unhappy with this anyway as Indie types are very much into buying used and vintage guitars, which means no profit margin for Fender. Fender sold a hypothetical guitar in 1975 and made, say, $25. They see nothing of a recent re-sale that can be thousands of dollars easy, perhaps even tens of thousands in rare cases.
I think if companies like Fender want to survive they need to do what Apple did and make their own stores to sell their own brand and to sell/broker vintage fender guitars and amps.
