COVER STORIES

Roll Out The Red Carpet

In the event that you doubted our industry’s in a renaissance of creative innovation, just check out this year’s Music & Sound Award winners. From the guitar category to percussion products, from mixers to print publications, and from DJ gear to wireless systems, these products are exceptional in quality and robustly profitable for brick-and-mortar dealers.

Feels Like The First Time

As part of our annual NAMM Show coverage, The Retailer is spotlighting a handful of first-time NAMM exhibitors and their game-changing product offerings. Some of the companies we cover might very well become household names. For now, though, all of them were happy just to be a part of the spectacle that is NAMM.

FEATURES

Music & Sound Award Dealer Winners

Music & Sound Award Manufacturer Winners

The Music & Sound Independent Retailer

INTERVIEW

Five Minutes With

MISSION REPORT

MI Spy

While taking his 19-year-old daughter back to Harrisburg University, our resident super sleuth visited four Harrisburg PA-area music stores. In a nod to rock ‘n’ roll band Ocean Blue and its lovely, saxophone-infused melodies, the MI Spy made the venerable sax—an instrument for his school-aged child—the object of his search.

COLUMNS

Front And Center

Dawn Birr has spent the majority of her professional career with Sennheiser and Neumann, and she’s loved every minute of it. She’s worked hard, overcome adversity and steadily climbed the ranks.

From The Trenches

If you ship product on a regular basis, you know the “Oh drat!” feeling that comes along with postal rate changes. They can be a huge drag on your operations. Allen McBroom offers some key tips.

Shine A Light

Schenectady NY’s Drome Sound is gearing up for its 50th year of serving the needs of local community music makers, as well as national and international touring bands that come through upstate New York.

Retailer Rebel

Gabriel O’Brien missed both Summer NAMM and the NAMM Show over the past 12 months. He reflects on the importance of both expositions, and explains why he can’t wait to go back.

Veddatorial

When you consider music making and music products as a whole, we’re a global industry. And we’ve been global almost from the point where everyone agreed that the Earth is a globe.

Under The Hood

One of MI’s most iconic brands, Fender, truly wowed the global music products industry at the NAMM Show when it unveiled the American Professional line of guitars.