V E D D AT O R I A L
THE LESSON ACADEMY By Dan Vedda
This month’s rant is about the proliferation of the “Lesson Academy” as a vehicle for music instruction. It’s another example of our industry abdicating (consciously or not) some of its power and influence to entities that will not necessarily work in our best interests. The Lesson Academy model has expanded throughout the country, sometimes led by extraordinary educators who love teaching but have no affinity for retail, but also, unfortunately, sometimes led by people who have no affinity for education, either. If you’re a retailer that does not offer lessons, this phenomenon may not be on your radar. Perhaps you’ve benefited in some way because local Lesson Academy students happen to buy things from you. You may even have developed a synergy with one or more of these academies to help drive sales, offering some sort of commission for referrals. But to the many stores that still offer lessons, the Lesson Academies are a mixed blessing at best. Sure, lesson-only facilities get people playing, but often, that’s the endpoint. Nothing guarantees that their students will purchase anything from you. If you’re a retailer that offers lessons, you are considered competition, at least as far as the academy operator who is solely focused on the number of bodies booked into the lesson studios is concerned. It’s a disincentive to point those students to your lesson-offering store, which is why so many Lesson Academies point to Amazon instead. Your store’s web presence and ecommerce efforts may help, but again, there’s no guarantee those academy students will buy from you or even discover you. If they’re buying their household needs from Bezos-Mart, the inertia (and that “but I get free freight!” imperative) is hard to overcome. 42
That sense of competition is one reason I have an issue with academies. The other main gripe: Some cause more harm than good, not just to retail, but to the students themselves. First, let me state clearly that I believe in-person lessons in a brick-and-mortar facility of any kind are still viable. The wave of students we’ve added to our lessons program that are soured by the online experience makes me believe “in-person” still has the advantage, pandemic notwithstanding. But I also don’t think a Lesson Academy is automatically the best expression of this method of teaching. If you’ve looked at some of the Lesson Academy marketing (and it’s ubiquitous: I get emails, snail mails, Facebook ads and other hits almost daily), the main thrust of the pitch is “How to Maximize Enrollment and Profit.” The tactics and rah-rah motivational blarney recall those sketchy
seminars for house-flippers and Amway meetings. In all the materials I’ve looked at (and I’ve never “joined,” so of course I haven’t seen it all), the main topics are enrollment, retention and profit. I’ve never seen a word about the quality of the instructors or overall educational goals for the schools. I get the emphasis on increasing enrollment above all else, in the sense that all the revenue has to come from lessons because there’s nothing else to bring money in. I just think it makes it harder to do the best job of educating the students. I’ve also encountered some owners of these Lesson Academies. Some are truly dedicated, committed to education and feel this is the best use of their skillset. But for every one I’ve met that’s passionate about education, I’ve met one or more that might as well have bought into a Subway franchise instead — if
they could have afforded it. I’ve seen owners who have almost no musical background (other than perhaps playing in band or taking piano as a kid), who have no clue about organization (we’ve seen scores of students fed up with the “no teacher/ double-booked slot” problems they continually encounter with these academies), or who have the personality of a stereotypical license bureau worker. I have faculty members on my staff who have put in time at some of the many academies in our market, either as regular teachers or as one of the constant “subs” who fill in for absent teachers. (Because the academy motto is essentially “No Lesson Left Untaught,” there is heavy use of substitute teachers. I won’t even get into the confusion and frustration the students feel when faced with a rotating cast of instructors, except to say that I’ve also booked many students who APRIL 2021
