Hi Ian

While there may be other factors, I can tell you from first hand experience that their marketing was the major factor. I worked with a Roland dealer and they allowed certain instruments by divisions into different types of stores. At the time it seems to me it was the piano stores that were allowed to sell them only and the piano dealers didn't want to stock them because they didn't want it to interupt a sale of an $80,000 Steinway nor did they want to show them and have online retailers give them away. Also, they were very strict about selling out of your own territory and if you did and were caught you'd lose the franchise. This of course affected online stores, They had the absolute most stupid marketing plan I had ever heard of in over 30 years of music retail.

I was also with Techics dealers. In the entire piano, organ, keyboard music business seemed to have the most fly by night approach of any company I had ever seen. Every tech I ever talked to complained of after sale support. The organ dealers would mark them up so high, as in organ type sales and/or didn't stock them and/or hid them in the back room because largely the brain in the keyboards was the same as their organs and digital keboards but for a lot less money. Also, I feel they thought the small portoin of their sales was not worth it especially in a dwindling maret especially for home organs.


Scott L