The Business of Piano Teaching in Singapore (The Economy of Music Education)
It’s been 2 months since we moved into Toa
Payoh and we are absolutely enthralled with our new neighbourhood and its
modest, unassuming character. Where I sit at the piano, I see the trees and
occasionally, squirrels scurrying up and down, delicate butterflies, and oriole
birds doing a pas de deux. Occasionally, I hear the muted sounds of the French
horn coming from the adjacent block, someone practicing scales from the
opposite block and it is heartwarming to hear music at random moments during
the day. I remember one of our first journeys home where the notion of having a new
home fully sank in: leaving Changi then driving on the PIE right to the heart
of Singapore where we live, instead of the old familiar route passing East
Coast Park and the Tanjong Pagar port, turning off the AYE onto Lower Delta
road to my mother’s apartment at Redhill where we used to stay on previous
trips back. Living in a mature HDB estate also means that there are staggering
numbers of outstanding hawkers and eateries, enough to keep one gastronomically
hooked for several months, just within the boundaries of Toa Payoh.
We put in much thought and effort into
setting up our piano studio and are amazed that the graphic renderings and
dozens of sketches done on paper, are now a living reality where we can host
friends and welcome prospective students. Setting up a piano studio after many
years of being away from Singapore has several challenges. I’ve had to do way
more marketing and advertising than I ever could imagine, given how saturated and
competitive the music education industry is these days and how there are so
many music schools apart from Yamaha and Cristofori, which were the two
dominant music education providers during my time. I wish there were some
official statistics on this but I get the impression that there are thousands
of piano teachers who market themselves using various internet platforms and
faceless music agents who claim to provide professional matchmaking services
between a student and teacher. How can one navigate through this unregulated
free market industry and make informed decisions about where to go for music
lessons?
Several well-meaning relatives and
acquaintances have asked me why I want to start out as an independent
freelancer and don’t want to join a music school, given the stability and guaranteed
catchment of students. As a teacher-musician who studied at music university
for 6 years with teaching experience, I believe that retaining my autonomy and self-representation is important. I want to be
the one who communicates directly with my student and their parents and I
believe in the need to have an open dialogue and honest conversation, before
starting lessons. While there are a handful of credible schools run by genuine,
qualified and passionate musicians, I am profoundly disturbed by the flagrantly
capitalistic, business-oriented and profit-driven manner in which some music schools
are run.
I find headlines by ignorant magazine
writers who come up with articles such as “Singapore’s top 10 music schools”
quite hilarious, especially when numbers such a student enrolment, or notions
such as “fastest-growing” don’t equate at all to quality, but point squarely at
business expansion of a group of investors pumping money into opening more
branches. There are too many platitudes and vacuous statements directed at
parents to unleash their child’s inner Mozart. I am disturbed by stories of
hearing teachers having crammed back-to-back teaching schedules amounting to 9
hours on weekends. I’ve seen how music schools try to monetise every inch of
space due to their overheads and high rents, and the result is to create as
many 5 square meter teaching cells for students, and stock as many cheap, low quality instruments as possible. A music lesson becomes a commodity
as what a parent pays for a lesson, goes towards several parties: purchase of
the instrument (ideally played to death, with the least number of tunings), the
music teacher, the administration, the manager, the overheads, the operational
costs, the owner of the school, the marketing team, the investors etc. As a teacher-musician, do I want to be a cog in this wheel, slogging for some faceless capitalist investor and to surrender a significant fraction of my wages for their profit?
There needs to be more awareness when it
comes to discerning how music schools and even music teachers conduct
transactions and brand themselves in an inflated way, by virtue of affiliation
with a certain prestigious brand which has entered the mainstream market
through its two other budget piano ranges. A number of music schools and music
teachers very proudly display this association like a badge of honour: in return
for their purchases from this piano brand (not necessarily synonymous with manufacturer), they get officially endorsed
and rewarded with "privileges": opportunities to showcase themselves and their students in a certain gallery. Correspondingly, beginner students who are thinking of
buying a certain model associated with this prestigious brand get 6 months of
free piano lessons from one of their “official educators” (read: a teacher who
purchased a certain brand of piano), with an interest-free loan. How altruistic
and magnanimous to be making piano lessons so attractively affordable, in one
uncomplicated package!
It is time that we realise how piano
manufacturers and dealers actively capitalise
on the music education industry, no doubt a goldmine in Singapore (if the
tuition industry is worth S$1.4 billion, I wonder how much the music education
industry amounts to and I worry about the increasing marketisation of this sector). This isn’t a new phenomenon as in the case of Yamaha we
have a manufacturer creating demand for its own products, at a time of the
growing affluence of the middle-class. The Yamaha music classes department was
established in the mid 1950s in Japan, coinciding with the economic boom and
postwar reconstruction. A formidable household name with mass outreach,
manufacturing and the selling of instruments, Yamaha built its overseas empire
from the 1960s and opened its branch in Singapore in 1968. Over the last 2
months since my return to Singapore, I have seen some other marketing campaigns
such as this one, which caught my attention.
We need to critically evaluate what is in the marketplace and do more research on what exactly we are buying, read independent reviews (after hearing sales talk) and to ask questions about the origins of our products, simply: "Where was this piano made"? "Am I paying too much for a brand and is the price tag commensurate with its value"? There are many names out there that deliberately serve to obscure, mislead, confuse, and there is a need for more transparency and accountability in this business, which has operated for too long based on under-the-table handshakes and mutually beneficial deals. As music educators, our job is to disseminate objective information to parents and students, not get lured by the monetary side of making money from student referrals or the vanity of publicity. We ought to resist becoming part of the commoditised music education industry ourselves.
We need to critically evaluate what is in the marketplace and do more research on what exactly we are buying, read independent reviews (after hearing sales talk) and to ask questions about the origins of our products, simply: "Where was this piano made"? "Am I paying too much for a brand and is the price tag commensurate with its value"? There are many names out there that deliberately serve to obscure, mislead, confuse, and there is a need for more transparency and accountability in this business, which has operated for too long based on under-the-table handshakes and mutually beneficial deals. As music educators, our job is to disseminate objective information to parents and students, not get lured by the monetary side of making money from student referrals or the vanity of publicity. We ought to resist becoming part of the commoditised music education industry ourselves.
Here are some links I would like to share, about German pianos and the impact of globalisation on German piano manufacturers. This article by Larry Fine also offers an excellent summary on the different countries that manufacture pianos, and the trends that have occured over the last 50 years:
"To better survive in a global economy, high-end companies have diversified their product lines to include low- and mid-priced pianos, setting up factories or forming alliances with companies in parts of the world where labor is cheaper. At the same time, makers of low- and mid-priced pianos are creating higher-priced models using parts and expertise usually associated with the high-end companies, thus blurring the line between the high and low ends of the piano market".
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