The slow death of the electric guitar

The canonical 4 piece band is in decline, as is music that highlights the electric guitar with riffs & a guitar solo. Mass consumption of electric guitar music is what is in decline. Instrument sales are only a symptom and byproduct of changing cultural music tastes. And there's no way to fix it, you can't control what's popular.

As a guitar player, I think electric guitar has enjoyed unfair levels of popularity relative to other instruments for the past 50 years. Among other good reasons I've read in the comments here, this may be an equalizing correction. "Death" seems hyperbolic, there's no evidence guitars will somehow disappear, but a decline was probably inevitable.

I think it's fascinating to read theories about how to "fix" the "problem". If people buy less guitar music, then guitar sales will fall, and with that in mind it seems so quaint and cute and sweetly misguided to focus development efforts on online guitar classes. Do we think online clarinet classes will bolster clarinet sales?

This is... whilst not exactly incorrect, it's not the whole truth either. The article touched a little bit on this with the robotic tuner thing, but didn't fully explain why.

In my experience partaking in internet guitar forums over the decades, the vast majority of guitar players are really conservative. Extremely conservative. Especially people who mostly are into Fender/Gibson/PRS. They shun every new material (graphite/carbon fiber necks/fretboards), even if it has clear advantages (torsion/tensile/impact strength, weight, temperature/humidity insensitivity), often with unscientific emotional-based hand-waving like "it sounds too cold".

Headless guitars also stayed niche, even though they have clear advantages (lighter, shorter, more well-balanced, can't break your headstock off — a quite common way to damage your guitar).

It also took decades for 7-string guitars not to get scoffed at. The first 15+ years you had a lot of guitarists making fun of people with 7-string guitars. After they became somewhat accepted, 8-string guitars had an easier time, mind you.

People are very sceptical of True Temperament (http://www.truetemperament.com/) as well, believing that you can't perform string bending (you can, it doesn't really feel any different), and decided that to be the truth without even bothering to try.

There are still many areas on the guitar you can improve and innovate (and some stuff out there already that primarily Ned Steinberger showed us in the 80s could (and IMO should) be standard), but people want fragile, heavy and climate-sensitive "tonewood" in their guitars. They want soft brass bridges. They want maintenance-heavy soft "nickel/silver" (actually brass and nickel) frets. They want headstocks.

Maybe these old people in the article (I'm 37 so I'm one of them as well, I guess) are the problem, and when younger people that don't revere the word "vintage" so much can usher in the era of the truly modern guitar that Ned Steinberger has shown us glimpses of? One can only hope.