Over 1.2 Million Served: Celebrating 25 Years of North Carolina’s Progressive Music

Progressive Music, a 25-year and million-plus lessons operation, started in a broom closet.

Actually, to be more accurate, the North Carolina lesson and retail center started out of the trunk of a car in 1992, and then graduated to a broom closet. It’s all about those baby steps.

Somehow, founder Bill Cuthrell, now 43 years old, isn’t fatigued by any of it.

“I’ve talked to other people in the industry who are in their 50s and late 50s, and they’re just tired, and I don’t know what it is, but I don’t feel like I’ve been in business that long,” Cuthrell says. “Maybe it’s because I’ve always enjoyed playing music – I was a touring drummer, and owning this business, so I’ve had to do both sides of it. I don’t know, it’s funny. I looked at it and went, ‘Man, where did those 25 years go?’ ”

But when he reflects on all the different locations he’s held over the years – one location for 8 years, another location for 9, and then some – then yes, he can see how the years have added up. Now sporting two North Carolina locations – one in Wake Forest and the other in Raleigh, both very much stationary – Progressive Music just celebrated its quarter of a century anniversary with Rocktober Fest last October, roping in guests with live music and food trucks that would ultimately run out of chow from the sheer quantity of guests in attendance.

“Because we had multiple bands play throughout the day, we probably had 600 people or more show up,” he says. “This event wasn’t about trying to sign up a hundred new music students or a big sales event. This was to say thank you for your business and supporting us for all these years. This was really a customer appreciation event that we want do every year now.”

But once the festival folded at the end of the day, the chunk of time that Progressive Music has been up and running remains a miracle mile. For all the cultural and technological changes in a “regular” 25-year span, 1992 to 2017 saw a particularly large boom of with the internet age. Gone are the days of scribbling receipts with carbon copies, and even crunching numbers on a desktop computer; the age of the iPads and mobile, wireless devices reign supreme.

“It’s just crazy. I can definitely tell you that the landscape has fully changed,” Cuthrell explains. Videos games and YouTube tutorials now push sales, as opposed to more in-real-life sources of inspiration. The desire to play remains, of course, but the inspirational sparks are flying from different sources these days.

“There are no Eddie Van Halens, there are no guitar gods that are moving guitars – there’s great guitar players, but that’s not what in the mainstream right now,” he adds. “What’s in the mainstream is ‘The Voice’ and ‘American Idol.’ So that landscape has just changed so dramatically in 25 years. I’ve seen it go from Slash and Guns ’n’ Roses, and I watched it sequence into ‘ Guitar Hero’ and ‘Rock Band’ – that drove a lot of sales, and drove a ton of people in. Gosh, we would just have a ton of people come in the shop, and we’d ask ‘what got you interested in playing?’ ‘Oh, I’m pretty good at Rock Band.’”

But with the flash-in-the-pan technological fads, even Guitar Hero and Rock Band, both extraordinarily popular less than ten years ago, have moved out of the periphery, and online tutorials – for makeup, DIY projects, and music lessons – are the new go-to for learning across the board.

“It went from a real, live person who was a great guitar player, who really should be driving people in to play a guitar, to a video game, and what draws them in the door [now] is YouTube,” Cuthrell says. “I hear this all the time – I heard it yesterday. ‘I’ve been thinking about taking lessons and I tried to teach myself on YouTube, but I just really hit a wall and I don’t understand it.’ I tell them ‘Youtube’s great – as long as you understand the fundamentals first.’ I just don’t think you’re getting that on video lessons. Videos lessons are fantastic, but I think they’re great as a supplemental thing with real lessons.’ “

“It’s like witnessing the second industrial revolution, but it was a technological evolution. I’ve been fortunate enough – and maybe unfortunate enough in some ways – to witness this technological revolution that we’ve been through,” he adds. “It’s like, man, am I seeing the slow extinction of the dinosaurs, or am I seeing the next generation? It’s an interesting time. It’s hard to pinpoint. I think virtual reality is really going to play a bigger part. We’re going to see a whole new ball game with video learning, and I think we’re rapidly heading towards that.”

Instructions aren’t the only changing facets of the industry – with the advent of autotune and drum machines, tech has replaced some forms of elbow grease in music.

“There’s not been one thing in my entire business that has not been touched by technology – some in good ways, and some in bad ways,” he adds.

But outside the world of video streaming services, and game consoles, Progressive Music has taken advantage of the instructional video trend to help students get lessons when life has other plans. Through private online portals, students can access videos of their instructors if they have to miss a lesson for whatever reason, therefore replacing the need to schedule and makeup sessions.

“Makeup lessons were the bane of my existence. How do you do them all?” Cuthrell says. “You’ve a kid out because he’s got a doctor’s appointment, or he’s sick, or there’s a death in the family, or it’s a holiday, and then next thing you know, you’re not in the business of doing lessons, you’re in the business of doing makeup lessons. We were just trying to find the most flexible solution. It’s all got to be tailored to that individual student.”

While Cuthrell himself hasn’t taught any lessons since about 2001, the portal system has been revolutionary for the other 40 teachers on his staff.

“I think for the most part, the technology has really allowed us to be flexible,” he says. And if anyone knows the importance of a steady regimen of lessons, it’s Cuthrell, who tells his own story to government representatives at the NAMM Fly-In. Before the broom closet, before the on-the-road drum lessons, Billy Cuthrell was a “ninth grade flunk-out” repeating his freshman year of high school after his futile first attempt.

Goofing off in the hallway, hair down to his waist, decked in Vans, and “probably high,” one day Cuthrell met school band director Miles Huggins.

“You’re always in this hallway. What is going on, man?” Huggins asked Cuthrell. The conversation ended with an invitation to join him after school with the school band – one he would initially blow off, but ultimately accept when he missed his ride and went looking for a pal to take him home.

“I tried a little guitar, I sucked at that, I tried a little bass, I was terrible at that, but I knew drums were my thing. I just got this feeling,” he says. From there, Cuthrell would go on to complete high school on time, despite having to repeat a year, by staying late every day to make up on coursework.

“I credit Miles and that band program for getting me back on track and giving me something to focus on,” he says. “Music is push-ups for the brain.”

Better yet, he had a booming career in music by the time he was college-age. When Cuthrell was about to finish high school, he had landed himself in the top 5 on college charts and was touring the country – more than most minors can say, let alone people who had to repeat a year of high school. But the young musical success was short-lived – with that band in particular, at least – and at 18, Cuthrell was faced with the need to find some new job prospects.

“As we got out [of school,] the band kind of imploded. I thought “’I need to find a way to make some cash here, because my band is falling apart.’”

And so Cuthrell turned to what he himself had learned just a few years ago and founded his own business, named Progressive Beat, a door-to-door drum lesson service he operated out of his car at 18 years old. The original flyer from the October of 1992 still remains in Cuthrell’s collection of relics.

The mobile business model Cuthrell has established quickly lost its luster as schlepping from house to house and constantly unloading drum kits became a burden.

“It just dawned on me one day as I was sitting in traffic – I was like ‘Man, this is ridiculous,’ ” he explains. “In the time it’s going to take me to drive to this next student’s house, and get in there and get all that crap loaded into his house, set top and do this lesson, I could have taught two more lessons if I was stationary and they came to me.”

Upon this revelation, Cuthrell located a local music business and rented a literal broom closet (“This thing wasn’t even 10’ by 10’, man!” he says of the space), fashioning a custom drum kit to fit inside the area so that he and a student could still comfortably practice together. Without the need to relocate for students, business picked as he had expected, and when a space next door to his beloved broom closet opened up, he rented it.

Since then, Progressive Music has held a number of locations in North Carolina, and tweaked its name to Progressive Percussion upon introducing a retail aspect, and again to Progressive Music.

“I think two is the right recipe for us,” Cuthrell says, explaining his admiration for stores with tens, even scores, of locations.

But Progressive Music doesn’t need that kind of numbers to rack up statistics and achievements in other ways. In addition to the school’s mind-boggling amount of lessons over the years, Progressive Music is also responsible for the first rock-school-format summer program in the country in 1996 (not counting Skip’s Music’s Stairway to Stardom program, Cuthrell notes). Technically, Cuthrell taught the “School of Rock” far before Jack Black did in the flick of the same name in 2003.

“We’ve done well over a million private lessons – from my calculations, we’ve surpassed 1.2 million,” he laughs. “We used to joke – we need the McDonalds sign.”

“When I started the business I wasn’t thinking long term, I was just trying to survive and make it through the second year,” Cuthrell says as he reflects on the anniversary of Progressive Music. “Now I look back and realize I have five teachers that have been with me for over 17 years, and I think that says a lot. The old saying is true, find something you love to do and you’ll never work a day in your life. My staff and I still love the industry and our jobs just as much today as we did in the beginning.”