Music Education at the Top of the Market Looks a lot Like it Does Everywhere Else

The idea of the itinerant music teacher who has piano students over to her cozy home or meets his young charges in the sunlit atelier of a music shop has a nice Norman Rockwell ring to it, and it’s still done that way in thousands of instances every week.

However, music instruction has also run into many of the same exigencies that education in general has encountered in the 21st century. They include an overabundance of musicians for whom having been good students themselves may not necessarily translate into becoming equally good teachers. Anyone who lives in a major city has seen scores of flyers on lampposts advertising guitar lessons for less than the cost of a decent lunch.

But also like many other services these days, those who can afford to pay more can get more. That’s one of the drivers behind Music To Your Home (www.musictoyourhome.com), the service that Vincent and Tracy Reina have been running from their suburban New York City home for over a decade. The husband and wife, both musicians (him: keyboards; her: voice) cull their stable of teachers from the upper strata of area musicians, with more than a few having masters or doctorates from schools like Juilliard, the Manhattan School of Music, and NYU. At $90 an hour, it’s not for everyone. However, nor is it solely for the one percent. Vincent says they pick students nearly as carefully as they vet teachers, looking for commitment as well as means. The business model is also careful at striking a balance: lessons are typically paid in an eight-week billing cycles, but students aren’t charged for that package until they’ve had their first lesson and are satisfied with the teacher.

Talking to Vincent, one can sense him constantly calculating the pros and cons of expanding the business versus keeping it local. There’s some attraction to the kind of reach that services like Take Lessons have achieved; even New York’s massive metropolitan area can seem finite compared to the universe of the Internet. On the other hand, he’s not warm to the amount of travel and other aspects of management that expansion would involve. And online services can too easily slip any boundaries that owners might set for them, with individual teachers able to compose personal resumes that often feel more appropriate for Craigslist postings than for Berklee applications. “I don’t want us to just become a directory of teachers who are all over the place,” he says.

That’s not to say that either approach is inappropriate, or even that they are diametrically opposed – Music To Your Home has experimented with some master classes online, and certainly the sharing apps like Uber and Airbnb have proved that people and digital can successfully coexist. But the Reinas face the same paradigmatic quandary that all music education confronts at a time when everything is supposed to be available everywhere, all the time: quantity and ubiquity often work against quality. To reduce it to a more colloquial equation: fast, cheap, good – pick two, because that’s the most you can get. Or more to the point: go wide or stay close – go for the reach of the web or accentuate the advantages of where you are.

There are other possible connections that can be made at this level. There’s the spouse of a notable Manhattan restaurateur who runs a children’s music day camp out of a recording studio that could be a good fit for an equally upscale education proposition. Once you cross an invisible yet palpable economic line, one that varies from zip code to zip code, but that you recognize when you cross it, the possibilities increase, both in potential and complexity. Thinking outside the box is the cornerstone of entrepreneurship, but as any number of startup veterans will tell you, make sure the box is really, really stable first.

Vincent says he’s looking at a number of other online propositions that involve music, tangentially or directly. But after a while much of what’s on the web begins to look like the Real Housewives of Somewhere Or Other. More concretely, last year’s National Study of Online Charter Schools, the first major study of online education effectiveness, concluded, based on research from 17 states, that online learning has failed to match that done by a live teacher.

It’s why the Reinas may end up remaining local, with online used to fill in when teachers have to tour or otherwise travel. But it’s also why Vincent says that teaching based in MI retail stores also remains a viable proposition. Local talent pools vary in depth, but he counsels patience with whatever a shop has to work with. “Even in the smallest markets, don’t settle for mediocre teachers,” he says. “Every teacher you work with represents you. We learned that the hard way.”

Teaching isn’t simply an add-on service to a store – it’s a resume and calling card. And while balancing an education business at the top end of the spectrum isn’t easy, it shares its most basic tenets with any other top-line venture: excellence is a full-time job.