Finding a new melody

by Ron Fortier

The Fall River Arts Academy has becomethe largest independently owned music school in the South Coast.

At last count, they are currently teaching over 550 students a week.

It founder, Todd Salpietro noted that the business has existed for 25 years, but “we've grown quite a bit over the last five or six years since we rebranded from ‘TJ's Music’ to the ‘Fall River Arts Academy.’"

The Academy offers private and group lessons in most of the popular instruments including piano, guitar, violin, drums, bass, clarinet, and the ukulele to name a few. Add voice lessons to this impressive list.

And it’s all available at one location. Salpietro played in a lot of local bands professionally, but “I always had a thing for business, and I thought that it would be really fun to open a business. Twentyfive years later I can say it's not an easy task to take on, and it's not for the faint of heart.”

Todd first established his business as a music store, focusing on drums. He soon realized that expanding into a full-line music store would be best and included guitars, professional DJ audio and lighting equipment, and lots more. But there was always a focus on providing music lessons.

At one point, Salpietro was teaching 75 private music lessons a week and “would be running the music retail shop and teaching lessons out of the back room at the same time.”

Eventually, his wife Tammy started to work with him and things started to accelerate. He now had someone on the front line to take care of the retail and music lessons for him.

Soon, they were hiring teachers and built new lesson rooms in the basement that they still use today. Together, he and Tammy grew the program from 100 students in 2017 to over 500 today.

A new tempo

The time was right. Tammy joined the business during a slump in the housing market. And coincidently, they noticed an uptick in their music lessons. “All these guys are coming in with construction boots on, with a big pickup truck outside and a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee,” Salpietro says. They all wanted to buy a guitar and begin taking music lessons because the downturn was the first time that they'd had to themselves in quite a long time.

Todd and Tammy quickly learned that the music business could thrive in a bad economy.

On the other hand, “The buskers and all the other musicians suffered. They had no venues to perform at, and that was tough. There was nothing beautiful about the pandemic, right?”

He continued, “it was very, very, scary and I thought it was almost like when the Twin Towers went down. You just had that sense of, you know, vulnerability to what was going on.”

As Massachusetts entered quarantine in March 2020, Todd and Tammy stayed focused, and were booking close to 400 students. When things shut down, Todd went out and bought eight tablets and installed the Zoom app on all of them.

He then called 400 parents, to save the business, to ask it was okay to teach their children on Zoom. Ninety-five percent were fine with it but it just wasn't going to be a good fit for the smaller kids.

A lot of students quit. They were down to 100 students by the end of the first year of the pandemic. But, at the same time, they were offering free online classes.

The Academy also kept their music instructors, who were also musicians, going. They had over two hundred guitar students learning on Zoom.

They also offered voice, ukulele, and drum lessons. But they also did something unprecedented. They gave out guitars, keyboards, and a couple of drum kits because they knew it was what these people needed.

“We couldn't take the music lessons away from the kids, and then, you know now, it built something that we didn't see coming. All the parents wanted to do lessons, too, because they saw the kids having so much fun in this half-hour session once a week on their tablet in their bedroom, and everybody was home!”

Contact Salpietro at 508-567-5555 or visit the Fall River Arts Academy website: fallriverartsacademy.com.