Guitar Center CEO Gabe Dalporto has spoken at length in the past about how he’s hoping to safeguard the store’s future by improving its stock of electric guitar gear and beyond, but there’s another priority he’s passionately pursuing as the company looks to get back on track – and it has nothing to do with selling gear.
In a new interview with Guitar World, Dalporto laid out his plans for restoring the retail giant’s prestige and reasserting its reputation as a go-to destination for players, and while there’s understandably a huge push on improving the quality of the gear it sells in order to cater to ‘the serious musician’, there’s also a big impetus on developing the next generation of players.
Because, not only is Guitar Center hoping to cater and sell gear to existing players, it’s also hoping to get new players started on their guitar journey by overhauling and improving its lessons base.
“One of our priorities is lessons,” Dalporto tells Guitar World when asked about the store’s upcoming strategies for the rest of 2025. “I talk a lot about ‘the serious musician’ and that's our opportunity to create the next generation of serious musicians.”
Guitar Center has been catering to the lesson space for some time now, but Dalporto has clearly identified it as an area that needs some TLC. After all, as he notes to Guitar World, the ratio of those who start playing, and those who continue to play after 12 months, is diminishing. That's something he hopes to change.
“One of the biggest challenges we have as an industry is, if someone picks up a guitar for the first time, for every 10 people who start playing guitar, a year later, one person is playing, and nine are not. What can we do to change that ratio?”
“And that's our lessons effort. It’s like, how do we connect with people early in their music career and really get them deeply embedded so they're going to be in it for the long term.”
Such a move will no doubt come as welcome news to Guitar Center fans and Guitar World readers, many of whom singled out lessons as one of the key areas that the store could improve on in order to get back on its feet.
Guitar Center lessons, though, isn’t the only way Dalporto is hoping to innovate the store outside of selling gear. The in-store experience is also set for a significant shake-up, and while Dalporto remains tight-lipped about what exactly such developments will look like, he has teased it could completely revolutionize the guitar-shopping experience.
“The other thing is AI,” he continues. “Right now, we've got a variety of AI initiatives, and when you walk into a store, how can you deliver an experience that you otherwise just never could have historically, or on the website? We're not ready to share exactly what that's looking like, but we have some prototypes going that are pretty cool.”
The full interview with Gabe Dalporto will be published to GuitarWorld.com soon.
