Or is it that the completely-analog piano has become more niche? Digital pianos these days sound and feel fantastic when put up against their analog counterparts in the lower end of the price range (what you'd find in a typical home). And they require zero maintenance and can be moved with ease. There will always be a place for a "real" piano, but you no longer need one if you just want to learn and play. I personally have a digital stage piano. It's 20 lbs. without the stand, and I can sling it over my shoulder with ease. 9 times out of 10, when I try to play a piano in someone's home it's out of tune and has some sticky or unplayable keys. So I'd say that analog pianos aren't dying, but they have become relegated to the niche of people who either want them as furniture or people who are serious enough to maintain and care for them. For the rest of us, digital is the right choice.

One must have a very poor set of ears if is unable to detect the difference between those hi-end digital honky tonk pianos and the niche piece of furniture I have in the living room.

Maybe it's just that I can buy a top-of-the line yamaha motif that plays really well, can be carried to gigs, has dozens of other functions, and (most importantly) never needs tuning, all for fraction of the cost has something to do with that number?

I've owned several pianos... I won't again, if I can avoid it. Just keeping an instrument in tune is enough of a problem: there is one tuner in my area who can get the thing in tune, and I don't like how he does his intonation.

I understand that piano production is way down from the early 20th century, but it's not like there aren't other instruments which have replaced it.

And, further, unlike instruments like the Fender Rhodes piano or the Hammond tone-wheel organs, these things are both still being produced and will in demand for the foreseeable future.

I also play pedal steel, and it is a similar situation: they make a lot fewer instruments these days because there are a lot of alternatives, but there is still more demand than output.

Actually, someone's started making Rhodes pianos again. I've heard they're good, but I've not played one.

Well I'll be damned... though it looks like it might be tough to get one :D

Are you kidding? Probably about 1 in 3 people I know has taken piano lessons before, and about 1 in 10 people I know practices regularly, if I were to guess.

On the other hand I can understand why sales of pianos are dying. Young people these days are increasingly living in shared apartments, multi-family spaces with poor sound isolation, and constantly on the move around the world and needing to live light. Most people who practice solve the problem either with an electric piano or visiting a communal piano at a nearby school, university or elsewhere. Those communal pianos, if maintained well, tend to last several decades.

It's 2,000 grand pianos / yr, 500 upright pianos / yr. 149. Around 1,000 grand pianos and 250 upright pianos are produced per year in the New York Factory. The Hamburg Steinway Factory produces a similar number of instruments.

http://www.steinwaypianos.com/159-facts-about-steinway-and-t...

How long does a piano last? Surely the market is saturated at some point, especially for extremely expensive pianos like these.

It depends on how much it's played. A Steinway in your home is likely to last a lifetime or more. The Steinway in the recital hall at our school is between 20 and 30 years old (I think), and well past its prime. It's played (hard) probably 4-6 hours a day, and eventually they just wear out. It would make a fine piano for someone's house, but it's no longer a performance-quality instrument. (Our own personal piano is a pre-WWII instrument, a 5'9" Knabe with ivory keys. It's been rebuilt once, and is a little...quirky, and could probably do with another rebuilding. It was also a very good deal for two just-out-of-grad-school musicians.)

Some music schools have contracts with Steinway where they get all-new instruments every year, which are sold back to Steinway at the end of the year who sells them as used instruments. I'd imagine (but have no evidence) that music schools in general are one of the largest consumers of pianos. At our undergrad institution of ~200 majors, we have probably 30-40 pianos in the building. My graduate school probably had upwards of 200, and employed 3 full-time piano technicians to maintain them.

My gf's Steinway is nearly a hundred years old. If they're refurbished every 30-40 years or so and kept in conditions that make sure the frame/case don't warp or crack, they can last indefinitely.

It's relatively trivial to do a minor refurb to replace and realign hammers/felts, rather more expensive to replace the tunings pegs and strings, quite a big deal to do all the above and replace the soundboard too.

Gf's instrument is getting near to needing a complete rebuild, which we're estimating will cost around £6k and take a few months.

I can appreciate the interest in digital instruments, but nothing sounds close to the sonic richness, weight, projection, and detail of the real thing. You certainly can't play classical piano music on a sampled keyboard and have it fill a concert hall the way you can with a Steinway Model D.

The same thing has happened with pipe organs. There, the cost of a physical instrument is much larger—modest instruments are well over six figures, with many instruments reaching $1 million. Digital organs have found a place in many venues—especially those, such as concert halls, that only use them infrequently. However, there is still a thriving community of builders churning out new pipe organs, and a bank of speakers still can't match the power of thousands of individual pipes.

I saw an organ in the Netherlands that dates to the 1700's, and has been played by many legendary composers (including Haydn and Mozart, IIRC). While it's obviously seen continuous maintenance, it's still playable and used for performances today.

Growing up, I had a 150 year old upright (I forgot the make). It had a great sound, but a bad move between homes cracked a major support in it and it would have cost more to restore it than to buy a new one.

My parents finally sold it to a tuner for scrap long after I moved out.

In high school I was an exchange student and had a chance to play on a late 19th century "grand" style piano forte that was still in perfect working order and seemed like it would be good to go for quite a while. It didn't sound quite a nice or bright as a modern piano and had a smaller keyboard, but it worked well enough.

I think the Chinese market has helped suck up some product.

This process has been going on for over a century. Ever since the introduction of the phonograph, the social importance of sharing music around a piano has been in significant decline.

I'm not sure I agree entirely with this. Historically, pianos haven't been widely owned, and performances haven't been widely attended. Although I would guess ownership is probably more evenly distributed now than ever before (especially considering high quality digital pianos).

Piano (orchestra in general) does seem to infiltrate common culture fairly pervasively (at least american) through movies. Maybe it could even be argued that it's more culturally prevalent, but just less prominent.

I agree. I love piano music and large concert halls. A bit of a non-sequitur I love this piano video of Benjamin Grosvenor playing with David Gray interrupting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IPkNbuaSAg

I would love to have a piano-like instrument again, I just don't want to maintain a real piano anymore. Dating myself, I'd rather have an Ensoniq ASR-88 as the keyboard interface and soft-synths on a computer actually generating the audio.

I have no evidence, but that figure of 500/year can't possibly be correct. Maybe 500 of their largest, concert hall-size grand pianos, but not their entire line.

In fact it is not that far off, and accurate for uprights;

2,000 grand pianos / yr, 500 upright pianos / yr.

Credit to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10147054

Yes, I agree.

Puts on Comedian hat

There are far no items or instruments in this world that can instill a comparable fear and loathing in a child than a piano.

You'd think that with so many people typing on keys on computers or phones, some of them might actually make something beautiful with that energy.

Oh, an exclusive and highly prized piano? Well, I look forward to seeing it on CraigsList under the heading "Free Piano - MUST PICK UP!"

Comedian hat off