Retail: The Mall of Fame

The growing number of music museums all have a retail component. Is there a connection?

The event commemorating the opening of the new Grammy Gallery at Nashville’s Musicians Hall of Fame & Museum started very un-musicianlike – that is to say, exactly on time. Perhaps not so surprising, given the painstaking precision with which the Recording Academy, the Grammy Awards’ parent organization, manages that annual television extravaganza. But the MHOF&M, as it’s awkwardly acronymized, is a surprisingly organized place, chronicling various eras and geographies of music’s most legendary soloists and session teams, including The Memphis Boys, Muscle Shoals’ Swampers, Detroit’s Funk Brothers, and L.A.’s Wrecking Crew with palpably passionate curation, even if it’s missing an annotation or two here and there. 

What the Recording Academy has moved into the MHOF&M, which is housed in the Nashville Municipal Auditorium, is a scaled-down version of the Grammy Museum, one of the glitzy hubs in the LA Live complex in Los Angeles’ revitalized downtown. Where Grammy’s institution celebrates the artists, the MHOF&M enshrines music’s trench dwellers, who labored largely anonymously, a condition only made worse with the demise of even the minimal real estate that the CD jewel box offered as a place to display recording credits. And where the Grammy repository in Los Angeles is in the middle of a multi-billion-dollar architectural gem, the MHOF&M has led as peripatetic a life as the musicians it memorializes. It opened in 2006 in the midst of warehouses and homeless shelters in what had been disparagingly referred to as the Gulch, then one of Nashville’s urban boondocks. But by 2010 it had been displaced, shoehorned out by eminent domain as the neighborhood underwent rapid gentrification and The Gulch suddenly became a desirable address. The MHOF&M landed at the Municipal Auditorium in 2012, tucked away on the city’s less-hip north side amidst government buildings and lunch places that close by 4 p.m., and had teetered along, often powered more than anything by founder Joe Chambers’ sheer force of will. (Its economic foundation was bolstered last year when it became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable corporation. This change in status allowed it to enter into a formal partnership with the Grammy Museum, another nonprofit organization. The Mike Curb Family Foundation also provided an anchor gift of $100,000 to fund a special Curb Gallery there, and other fund-raising efforts have begun in earnest.)

Walk This Way

What both museums have in common, though, are the retail appendages that any self-respecting museum sports today: the gift shop, through which all visitors must pass and – hopefully – spend. The Grammy Museum Store in L.A. is brightly lit and sleekly stocked, and at almost a thousand square feet could reasonably hold its own against the MOMA’s or the Broad’s emporiums. The one at the MHOF&M, at 520 square feet, is simpler and plainer, some stark theatrical lighting suggesting a bit of drama, and it quickly gets down to brass tacks: logoed t-shirts, baseball caps, coffee mugs and shot glasses make up the bulk of the inventory. The single best-selling item: guitar picks bearing the MHOF&M imprint. At one dollar each, they have the best margin in the shop. 

(In fact, Chambers’ own background is rooted in retail. He’s had several iterations of Chambers Guitars stores, the last one of which, in the suburb of Murfreesboro, closed two years ago, or “two years too late,” as Chambers archly puts it. He cites online sales and the cost of overhead as the reasons for getting out of retail.)

The museum store is the connection between the proliferation of music-themed museums and the MI retail community. While the number of MI retail stores declined 10 percent, from a high of 8,530 in 1999 to 7,678 last year (as per MMR’s own data), music museums have virtually exploded. There are complex, interactive ones, such as the EMP Museum, formerly the Experience Music Project Museum, in Seattle, nominally focused on the legacy of Jimi Hendrix and which uses interactive technology to engage over 511,000 visitors a year, and the putative granddaddy of them all, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, which attracts 477,000 museumgoers annually. Others are focused on genres, like the National Blues Museum in St. Louis ort the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City. Some venerate the musician, such as venues dedicated to Johnny Cash, Abba, Elvis, the Ramones and the Allman Brothers; others curate their instruments, be it the comprehensive Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix or the surprisingly serious Kazoo Museum in Beaufort, South Carolina. What they all have in common, aside from a musical theme, is a gift store. 

Museum shops occupy a critical spot in any museum’s ledger – after admissions, institutional and government grants, and private contributions, a museum’s retail appendage is often it’s last chance to bolster its bottom line on a daily basis. But as importantly, it’s also one more opportunity to create a relationship with the customer. 

“You want people to leave with a memory, a good memory of the museum, and leaving with shot glass or a mug they’re taking a token, a piece of us,” observes Rachel South, museum front manager at the MHOF&M. She believes the inclusion of Grammy-themed merchandise in the store – something Amy Holm, the MHOF&M’s director of public relations, says is planned for – will encourage that effect. The musicians’ museum had already expanded its brandable items – it sells t-shirts that represent some of those subjects on display in the museums itself, such as Led Zeppelin, and carries t-shirts and branded merch from Sun Studios in Memphis (a hybrid venue that’s a museum by day and working studio by night – and it has its own gift shop). Laurie Patton-Smith, who manages the MHOF&M’s museum store, says they’ve also been trying to find less quotidian items for sale, to attach a sense of collectability – a useful emotion for a museum. They’ve recently commissioned a numbered, limited-edition run of MHOF&M posters, made by Nashville’s highly regarded Hatch Show Print shop, that convey a sense of esthetic exclusivity. Patton-Smith, who shares a background in retail with Chambers, says they’ve tried selling very musician-centric products in the gift shop, including strings and guitar straps (neither of which bear MHOF&M logos, incidentally) as an experiment. 

The Next Step

While Chambers is cautious about this – the says he doesn’t want the museum or its store to become “a glorified Guitar Center,” and that the history will always be the primary focus, the music-museum’s gift store may be ready to cross a line in the future. Bob Santelli, executive director of the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, was on hand for the opening of the Grammy Gallery, seated on the dais with Peter Frampton, Brenda Lee and Nashville Mayor Megan Barry. He suggests that the proliferation of music-themed museums is a collective way of “coming to terms with the great musical traditions that we have,” he says, standing inside an installation in the Gallery where visitors can “co-write” a song with Desmond Child, who penned “Livin’ On A Prayer” and other mega–hits. “This is not a history museum, not like the ones you or your parents know about. It’s a museum about unraveling the mysteries of the creative process, and along the way telling great stories about the artists and the regions.”

There may be room within that ambitious vision for musical instruments to actually carried by and sold through Grammy Museum shops in the future. Santelli says the idea has been discussed. “A kid comes in and picks up a guitar [in the shop] and says, ‘This is fun!’ What’s the next step?” he asks, suggesting that the enthusiasm engendered by the museum visit followed by being able to actually hold a guitar in the shop might translate not just into a sale but also a lifelong passion.

Santelli says neither the Grammy Museum nor its Museum Shop, which he estimated brought in “a couple million dollars a year” in revenues, would consider endorsing any particular vendors, but Roland has developed a relationship with the Grammy Museum, creating accessible installations there that “already puts instruments in kids’ hands,” he explains. The company outfits three areas in the Los Angeles flagship museum – Stage, Studio and Electronic Music – with its electronic drum kits, keyboards, BOSS-powered electric guitars and BOSS effects pedals, and Roland/AIRA dance and DJ gear. Santelli further stated that other brands have been helpful in outfitting the Grammy Museum, including Fender and Martin, and would be among the first invited if the decision were made to include MI products in the museum-shop inventory mix. (When asked if there were any Roland products planed for the MHOF&M, Rachel South laughed and said, “Not yet.”)

Santelli emphasized that this is an embryonic idea at this stage. However, if the Recording Academy decides to move forward it could scale significantly: the Grammy Gallery at the MHOF&M is the museum’s third outpost, after the main one and another blues-themed location opened March 5 in Cleveland, Mississippi; the Grammy Museum also has three affiliates – the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston, Jamaica; the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and the Beatles Story in Liverpool, England. All have gift shops stocking Grammy-themed merchandise. Santellli says more domestic editions of the Grammy Museum are planned, with one or two to be chosen from a short list of six by the time of the next Grammy Awards show, which takes place in early 2017.

Santelli hopes to see music fans visit each location of the Grammy Museum and leave with a fitting memento. “Years ago, when the Hard Rock Cafés began, people collected Hard Rock t-shirts from London, Beijing, Singapore,” he says. “We hope people feel the same way about all the Grammy Museums.”

Grammy Museums carrying a limited line of MI-type merchandise – picks, straps, string or even an entry-level guitar or drum kit – isn’t a cause for concern for the MI retail business. Collectively, their inventory would still be less than even the smallest rural MI retail store, and most visitors still have to pay an admission to the museum before they can access the museum store. It could, however, create a perceptual connection between the retail environment and the music industry’s best-known flagship property. That kind of perceptual collaboration could be worth losing the sale of a Squire Strat or two.