WHY - A POSITION PAPER
The music industry didn't break by accident.
And it won't be fixed by one.
What follows is an argument — about how an industry that depends on musicians stopped working for them, why the institutions inside it can't fix this, and what we are building in their place. Read it as a manifesto. We mean every word.
Begin reading
I
The industry we inherited has been losing ground for seven years.
The school-service portion of the music industry — the part that puts instruments into the hands of children and keeps them playing — peaked in 2017 at 1.01 million units shipped. Seven years later, it has not returned. 2024 shipments came in at 785,000 units — a 22% decline from the 2017 peak, and the fifth consecutive year below pre-COVID levels.1 The broader industry tells the same story: three consecutive years of declining shipments, with 2024 retail value at $8.27 billion, down from a 2021 peak of $8.9 billion.2 Months pass before repaired instruments return to students. Customers walk into stores looking for guidance and get handed an instrument in a practice room with no one to ask. Manufacturers respond with price increases. Retailers respond with silence. The community that music was supposed to build is being dismantled by the people who were supposed to protect it.
i.
Retail has stopped
adapting
Music stores cling to a model where the customer is expected to know what they need before they arrive. Stagnation, not change, is what's putting retailers out of business — and the closures since the pandemic prove it.
ii.
Manufacturers can't
mentor
Preoccupied with their own survival, instrument manufacturers have no bandwidth for career development. They sell instruments; they don't build the people who service them, sell them, or teach with them.
iii.
Opportunities for musicians
keep shrinking
Demand for music has not declined. The pathways for musicians to build a career around it have. As musicians disengage from the industry that depends on them, both sides lose — and the loss compounds every year.
II
Musicians were cast as performers only. That casting is the cage.
The music industry decided, long before any of us arrived in it, that a musician is someone who plays — and, if they're lucky, teaches. Repair was handed to a separate trade. Sales was handed to retailers. Mentorship was handed to no one. The result is an industry where the people with the most knowledge — the musicians themselves — have been excluded from almost every role that builds it. That isn't a labor problem. It's a casting problem.
Music often serves as the sole bridge connecting individuals across seemingly insurmountable divides. It gives children independence, identity, and community — things nothing else in their lives can give them.
LISA CANNING • FOUNDER, WORKING MUSICIANS ACADEMY
“
A musician is not one role. They are at least four —
and the industry collapses every time we pretend otherwise.
– i.
The Player
Who performs – on stages, in pits, in studios, at services
– ii.
The Teacher
Who hands the craft to the next generation, one student at a time.
– iii.
The Technician
Who keeps the instruments alive — and the students playing them.
– iv.
The Seller
Who guides families to the right instrument, because they actually know.
III
So we are building the infrastructure the industry forgot to.
Working Musicians Academy exists because no one else was going to build this. We train working musicians as repair technicians, sales professionals, and the connective tissue between them — and we build the community infrastructure that the state, the schools, and the manufacturers have not. What follows is the position we hold. Not aspirations. Commitments.
– i.
Musicians belong in every role the industry needs filled — not just the two it has historically allowed them.
– ii.
Training has to be accessible to the musicians most qualified to learn it — which means online, affordable, and built around their existing careers.
– iii.
Communities don't need more instruments donated. They need local technicians, local sellers, and local pathways that keep instruments in students' hands.
– iv.
Musicians collaborate — they don't compete. The industry's scarcity model is the lie we're refusing to keep telling.
– v.
If the institutions won't rebuild this, we will — community by community, graduate by graduate, school by school.
THE VISION
Music as the bridge – not a credential.
Lisa Canning has spent decades inside the music industry as a performer, an educator, a retailer, and a witness to what stopped working. WMA is the thing she built when she stopped waiting for the industry to fix itself.
Her belief, plainly stated: music is one of the few forces in modern life that bridges genuinely insurmountable divides — between generations, between economic classes, between the lonely and the connected. Protecting that bridge is not a sentimental project. It is workforce development. It is community infrastructure. It is the work in front of us.
LISA CANNING
FOUNDER, WORKING MUSICIANS ACADEMY
OWNER, LISA'S CLARINET SHOP
If any of this rang true – the next step is a conversation.
We're building this with musicians, with school leaders, with foundations, with anyone who saw themselves somewhere in what you just read. Tell us which part. We'll take it from there.
– SOURCES
1. The Music Trades, Music Industry Census, 2022 and 2025 Editions, School Music section. Total school music unit shipments peaked at 1,010,000 units in 2017 and have not returned. 2024 shipments of 785,000 units represent a 22% decline from the 2017 peak. Shipments have remained below the 2019 pre-COVID level of 947,000 units for five consecutive years (2020: 640K; 2021: 716K; 2022: 800K; 2023: 802K; 2024: 785K). U.S. Department of Education K-12 enrollment fell from 50.4M (2019) to 49.6M (2024), forecast to reach 46.9M by 2030.
2. The Music Trades, Music Industry Census, 2025 Edition. U.S. retail value of music product shipments: $8.27B in 2024, down 2.1% from 2023; third consecutive annual decline since the 2021 peak of $8.9B.
3. Working Musicians Academy internal program data, 2022–2025. Student enrollment, completion rates, age distribution, and geographic reach are tracked internally and reflect paying enrollments only.
4. WMA industry conversations, NAMM 2024. The repair-technician shortage figure (40 of 41 music businesses unable to fill open positions) reflects WMA's own outreach to NAMM member businesses; it is not a published NAMM statistic.
Working Musicians Academy commits to citing the data behind every claim we make. If you find a number that needs correction, we want to know — please write to lisa@lisasclarinetshop.com.