Guitar Center Opens Near Seattle's Independent Music Stores

SEATTLE, WA - Last Thursday, as a winter storm was bearing down on the Seattle area, Guitar Center held a grand opening for its second Seattle store. While many around the region raided grocery stores, the Guitar Center at Roosevelt Square was offering "doorbuster" deals on guitars, keyboards, drums, and more.

That kind of grand opening is typical for Guitar Center, but what is interesting is the location. The new store is smack in a part of North Seattle where five of the city's most venerable independent music instrument stores are located.

The owners and employees at those stores are wary of their new big-box neighbor. But most are confident that they offer products and services that Guitar Center can't compete with.

About 3 miles from the new Guitar Center, Fremont's Dusty Strings has been dealing in high-quality instruments since the late 1970s. It's less of a store, more of a church, where you can worship by playing a $5,000 handmade Collings acoustic guitar, or a hammer dulcimer made in Dusty Strings' Interbay workshop.

Manager Dan Murdoch said he was worried when Guitar Center's first Seattle store opened years ago in South Lake Union, but it actually ended up being good. People who bought lower-end instruments at Guitar Center would bring them in for a repair, he said, giving Dusty Strings the opportunity to steer players toward better guitars and lessons.

"We don't have any sort of bad feeling or worry about it," Murdoch said of the new store. "We're grateful for or customers, and we're always here for them."

American Music in upper Fremont has been in the same spot since 1975. Manager Ted Morris doesn’t like how close the new Guitar Center is, but the store has been competing with the big-box giant for years anyway. In addition to a wide selection of products, American Music offers to match Guitar Center's lowest price.

"That's kind of been their M.O. since the start, getting close to other mom-and-pop stores to take any remaining meat off the bone," Morris said.

The iconic Trading Musician is just three blocks from the new Guitar Center. An employee declined to comment for this story, but Trading Musician offers a very eclectic shopping experience. It's the kind of store you can go to find a weird Italian guitar from the 1960s or a drum machine someone altered in their basement.

A few blocks from Dusty Strings is Mike and Mike’s Guitar Bar, which operated out of a garage north of Ballard for years. They sell curated vintage and rare instruments. If a band like Wilco was in Seattle, they might go browse at Mike and Mike's.

Guitar Center has close to 300 stores in the U.S., including four more in Puget Sound - Tacoma, Tukwila, Lynnwood, and Redmond. The chain started in the 1960s in California and grew aggressively in the 1980s and 90s. It got so big that it could - like Walmart or Home Depot - leverage its size to buy in bulk. Revered brands like Fender and Gibson started creating products specifically for big retailers like Guitar Center - usually made of cheaper materials and assembled overseas.

Guitar Center, owned by the private equity firm Ares Management, employs about 11,000 people across its stores and subsidiaries. The company had $2.2 billion in sales in 2017.

The cheaper guitars Guitar Center sells do help introduce new players, and therefore new customers, into the world of instruments.

"In our experience, people buy their first guitar at Guitar Center, and their second, third, and fourth guitar from us," The Guitar Store owner James Schultz said.

The Guitar Store, located along Aurora Avenue near Green Lake, serves people who are, in the positive sense, guitar fanatics. They host guitar pedal-building classes, and sell Paul Reed Smith guitars made exclusively for the store with rare pieces of wood.

He’s less concerned about Guitar Center's new store than he is about the cost of living and doing business in Seattle.

He opened 10 years ago in what was then a seedy neighborhood. Now there’s a Starbucks and a new apartment building next door. His rent has gone up, and his employees struggle to afford Seattle. About 70 percent of his business is online, so he’s competing with businesses across the U.S. that aren’t paying the Seattle premium. Sweetwater Sound, the largest internet instrument retailer, is located in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where you can rent a whole house for about $700 per month.

“We welcome [Guitar Center] in the neighborhood. Anything they can do to get more people to play music is great for me in the long run,” he said.

Guitar Center didn’t return a request for comment about why the company picked the Roosevelt location. The store in South Lake Union will close eventually because the building is slated for redevelopment, and it's unclear if the company will try to keep a downtown store.

American Music’s Ted Morris thinks that the local stores will get by on the one thing Guitar Center can’t use its girth to buy: authenticity.

“Our clientele is anti-Guitar Center, anyway,” he said.

Image via Associated Press