NAMM resumes with new CEO who welcomes AI
Extravaganza will feature more than 200 concerts
SAN DIEGO >> Timing is everything for the NAMM Show, the world's largest and oldest trade event for the creators, manufacturers, retailers and distributors of music instruments, equipment, technology, sound, lighting and recording gear.
This week, for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown began in March 2020, NAMM — short for the National Association of Music Merchants — will hold its annual winter summit in its traditional, four-day January time slot.
“The Federal Reserve Board recently announced it will be lowering interest rates, so it's a perfect time for our industry to come together at the 2024 NAMM Show and make plans for the future,” said John T. Mlynczak,
President and CEO of the Carlsbad-based trade organization.
This year's edition will run today through Sunday at the Anaheim Convention Center, the NAMM Show's longtime home. More than 3,000 brands will be unveiled by 1,600 major and independent companies who come from 101 countries and territories in the $19.5 billion music products industry. Long a members-only event, NAMM is now open to the ticket-buying public, although its target audience is music-industry pros.
The four-day extravaganza will feature more than 200 concerts and 500 events. These include the 39th annual NAMM Tec Awards, which honor audio professionals and innovative products; the 22nd annual Parnelli Awards, which honor live-events professionals; and the 12th annual She Rocks Awards, which honor female musicians and will this year be hosted by 2015 She Rock honoree Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles.
For 2023 She Rocks honoree Mary Spender, a British singer-songwriter who attended her first NAMM Show in 2015, the four-day event is a must. Ditto for her 700,000-plus YouTube followers, who avidly watch her online reports from the floor of the sprawling trade show and her year-round reviews of instruments and equipment.
“With the music community on YouTube, the NAMM Show is kind of like our Super Bowl,” Spender said. Along with Grammy-winning musician and producer Mark Ronson, she will be one of four featured guests joining NAMM honcho Mlynczak for the show's Thursday morning kickoff.
“It's really joyous to see people at NAMM — now more than ever since the pandemic — that you've only been talking to online,” Spender continued. “It's a great networking opportunity. I get to speak to bands and artists I admire — I interviewed Carlos Santana at the 2020 NAMM Show — and to be part of events that are really meaningful to me. At last year's NAMM Show, Martin Guitars invited me to perform to at their booth, which was a real honor. This year, I'll perform on the Martin Stage at 2 p.m. Thursday.”
The 2024 NAMM Show comes at a time when the industry it represents is eager to move forward from what The Music Trades — a leading global music products industry magazine — recently described as “a post-COVID hangover.” The reference is to last year's roughly 3 percent dip in the industry's
“With the music community on YouTube, the NAMM Show is kind of like our Super Bowl.” — Mary Spender, a British singer-songwriter
annual revenues, according to the magazine's estimate. That course correction comes after 2021 U.S. market earnings reached a record $8.8 billion — which was nearly matched by 2022's $8.7 billion tally — as reported by the 133-yearold publication.
“Manufacturers like Mattel have seen similar sales increases and declines, so this is not unique to our industry at all. Things have normalized,” said Paul Majeski, the publisher of The Music Trades.
“Today, more than half the new guitars sold are sold online, which would have been a laughable idea in the 1990s. And the retail market for used guitars and instruments has exploded.”
The record-setting profits seen in 2021 and 2022 can be largely credited to the pandemic shutdown. Live music events shuddered to a halt in 2020 and through much of 2021, while at the same time sales skyrocketed for guitars, keyboards, home recording equipment and other products consumers could play or learn to use at home. Consumer sales leveled off last year as demand dropped and some retailers found themselves overstocked.
Meanwhile, the top 100 concert tours of 2023 soared to a record $9.17 billion, according to Pollstar' magazine's Year End Top 200 Worldwide Tours chart. That fueled a dramatic increase in the demand for the audio, lighting and other stage equipment produced by some NAMM member companies.
Also, music performance classes at K-12 schools plummeted in 2020 and 2021, then roared back over the past two years, resulting in a big jump in the sales of school band instruments.
Of course, the music industry has always been cyclical. And the not-for-profit NAMM and its annual trade show have been impacted, both for better and worse, by the roller coasterlike surges and dips of the past four years.
NAMM's staff, which numbered 81 a few years ago, now totals 61. The 2021 NAMM Show was canceled altogether — after California prohibited large public gatherings — and replaced by a free, completely virtual edition called “Believe in Music,” the show's longtime
tag line.
The smaller annual NAMM Summer Session, which focused on acoustic instruments, did take place in Nashville in 2021, but in truncated form. It has been dark since then, but a new annual event to replace it will be announced by Mlynczak at Thursday morning's NAMM Show opening session.
In January 2020, the NAMM Show attracted a record 115,000-plus attendees. Attendance at the 2022 and 2023 NAMM Shows — scaled back to three days with fewer exhibitors — declined to between 47,000 and 48,000 both years. The socially distanced 2022 edition utilized only 50% of the Anaheim Convention Center, so the industry still is coping with change.
“It's still a period of transition,” NAMM leader Mlynczak acknowledged.
“I talk to our members every week and at least one member company each day. What we realize, across the industry, is we're all still recovering from the new pandemic. We don't know what the new `normal' is, but we do know what we're dealing with right now.”
The NAMM Show has endured and is set to grown again, while Europe's largest and oldest annual music trade show, Germany's Frankfurt Musikmesse, did not make it through the pandemic. The 23-year-old Music China trade show in Shanghai, which NAMM has partnered with since 2017, focuses on domestic Chinese music instruments and the Asian market. Smaller still is an annual event billed as as the NAMM Musikmesse in Moscow, which is geared to the Eastern European market and uses the NAMM designation despite the fact that NAMM has severed ties with it.