The Air BnBing of the World

When historians of economics look back at our time years from now, it’s likely that the period between the onset of the Great Recession in 2007 and me hitting the lottery in 2017 will be dubbed “the Era of the Sharing Economy.” It will have been that decade span during which the idea of renting our homes (Air BnB, VRBO, et alia), our cars (Uber, Lyft, Via, et al.), our clothes (RentTheRunway, Schecky’sCloset, et cetera), and ourselves (TaskRabbit, PalLocale, and on and on) became ubiquitous and weirdly normal.

Musicians, on the other hand, tend to be loathe to let their instruments out. However, musicians these days tend also to have a ton of less intimate stuff laying around that they’ll accumulate like pack rats, because musicians’ brains are wired with the phrase, “I’ll bet this’ll come in handy some day” near the front of the cerebellum. Now, the sharing economy is providing an outlet for the collected detritus of music. New York City-based tech startup Sparkplug launched last year as an online community marketplace specifically for creatives to share their tools and resources, though the vast majority of sign-ups have centered on music: instruments, guitar amps, drum kits, brass, pro audio gear – it’s all available through Sparkplug’s portal, via search engine that uses types and brands as well as locations. Users send the item’s owner a formal reservation request by clicking a “Reserve Item” button. He or she will then have 24 hours to respond before the request automatically expires. Owners set prices, but as with the rest of life, everything is negotiable – email addresses and phone numbers are shared after a reservation request has been accepted. If the item arrives and meets the borrower’s needs, payment will be released to the owner in 24 hours.

Obviously, while this is the Internet and you could conceivably rent a spare bassoon from a member of the Prague Philharmonic and have it DHL-ed to your door, the idea works much better when a user can motor over to a lender or a renter’s home and do the delivery or pick-up in person. And that’s where this begins to affect the music retailer, many of which do a brisk business in equipment rentals. The biggest downside to equipment rentals is that the residual value of the rented items tends to diminish rapidly, because of accelerated wear and tear. It’s always a race to achieve ROI-plus before the amplifier or PA system drops dead of overwork.

However, a local music retailer becomes the ideal hub around which musicians and recordists can create a bustling rental community. In the sharing economy, the risk is transferred to an individual owner. Sparkplug charges renters nine-percent of the rental fee, and charges owners three percent. That conceivably scales well on a national basis, but considering there’s virtually no capital needed to start the service, any return for them is gravy. As with Sparkplug, security deposits, in the form of a credit card on file and the appropriate documentation, protect the equipment owners and the service.

Am I suggesting that music retailers just take Sparkplug’s idea and try to make it work locally? Yes, because that’s one more thing the sharing economy can share. Sparkplug can work both locally and for touring musicians who pass through and find that an amp blows up during soundcheck. And a local store can often do it better – I entered “pedal steel” in Nashville in Sparkplug’s search engine and it returned a guitar pedal; asking it to find a Guild D-30 in the same city, which should have been a breeze, it came back with a Matchless DC-30 amp. In fact, local stores could create much more precise databases that list gear that can be rented regularly. None of this would hurt Sparkplug’s bottom line, and it could provide a small but meaningful lift for a savvy retailer.