retail sales associate

music manager

warehouse/driver

music teacher

retail store manager

Music & Arts

Work was boring. Overseeing little amount of staff with rarely any challenges, which I prefer challenges. Co-workers were awesome and personally the commute for me was great. The company just needs to admit that they ARE Guitar Center, and are being completely run by Guitar Center. It would help employees understand the now overwhelming corporate mentality. In the past, it was very much a mom+pop vibe, but along with that old vibe  was a lot of strong arming. Currently the vibe is more of a backstabbing feel. Not sure who to trust, who you can talk to and that you could be let go at any time. The company is implementing a lot changes, so the current state is much different I'm sure from even a few months ago. Most sales and revenue are accrued during summer and spring months, so be ready to be busy at the beginning of the school year, which varies across the country. Some departments are just busy all year because some they are constantly understaffed, like the merchandising dept. At this point, Guitar Center might even be taking over that role as well for Music and Arts. I would suggest that if you are wanting to work for  either the distribution center or the corporate location out of Frederick MD that you should be wary of job security. There were some  inconsistencies when it came to pay. In the latter part of my employment there was push for a more just (not equal) pay for employees, depending on tenure and prior yearly reviews. Which would be great if they actually did that. What I liked about the company was that they had great vaca/sick time, the benefits were as good as benefits could be for a retail company in the US. Lower rate insurance = high deductible, higher rate = lower deductible. They have the HSA account which they were, at my time of employment, contributing towards. It used to be that if you worked hard at the company that you would be considered for newer roles and promotion. It still is like that to some degree, but with this new corporate type of management they won't care whether you have product knowledge or have good interdepartmental relations, they care if you have a degree, if you come across as an butt-kisser and are willing to be paid below your worth. They would rather hire new, pay low and instill this robotic corporate 'yes sir' mentality. Not the creative innovative individuals. Depends on what you're after, for me personally I prefer challenges and growth, some people prefer to just maintain and go with a flow of sorts. There is a training department, which also is being fed agendas by Guitar Center, that is pushing to train management/supervisors to be better at their jobs. In my opinion, the effort is a bit overzealous when you consider that the job security is nearly non-existent. And most of these types of efforts, management training in this case, have always fell to the wayside. The company tries to instill a more positive workplace culture by having a battle of the bands competition once per year and doing little things here and there, not as much events or incentives as our parent company Guitar Center does. Wish I had more to say about the sales side of the business. I have seen a lot of store staff be moved to managerial roles, up to regional, up to corporate/buyers/merch positions and so on. And those sales staff really worked hard and earned their upward movement. Along with their hard work there was always some shady politics and a lot of personnel tension. It's a more cutthroat part of the business to say the least. After being with the company for many years I made so many friends had a lot of great experiences, had some very hard times and grew exponentially.

The training here IF done by someone who knows sales is actually very good.  It's one of the better things that helped me to develop business related skills. From a musical standpoint you learn a lot about instruments and the way business/education  partnerships work. You also learn how the business model works and how incredibly profitable Music and Arts is. The mentorship theme is quite heavy here and that is the absolute best part of this job if you are looking to learn this type of business knowledge.

However..there is a culture of doing too much with little direction and resources, mediocre planning and at times haphazard execution that leaves employee/management feeling overwhelmed. It's the "sell your soul" mentality where those who are talented or have the likeliness to succeed are often put through the ringer until stress ensues. The motto as many corporate companies have "Do more, feed the machine, more more more.."  

On a local level - management is generally good and even some mid-level management is good. However, after this level of leadership.. the out-of-touch layers start to impact the general scheme of business. While change is and can be seen as a good thing, upper management imports change ideology with what seems to be "near or no regard" for it's impact on day to day operations. No innovation, and very little forethought plague conceptualization. It's essentially  business experimentation without due research, or research using data that is easily skewed.  I've met and know a decent number of higher execs over the years and  they do mean well, but lack or lose genuine compassion as the corporate machine slowly consumes their soul...or I could be wrong and  they are just no longer paid to care.

A typical day at work for any employee revolves around opening operations, account auditing, merchandising/stocking and sales review. It can be fun when you get customers who really love music and you do get to chat about gear, but problematic phone calls generally fill that time. After 3:30, depending on your location and size of the lesson program the chaos begins. Droves of independent teachers and lesson clients walk through the doors with a multitude of problem solving, billing and scheduling issues that can take up a decent part of the rest of your day. Oh, between all this you have a sales goal to meet and again depending where you are located you are trained to handle phone related sales needs.

From August to October is crunch time. Instrument rental season compounds the above duties by adding hundreds of new customers to the mix that are coming in to rent instruments for the school year. You definitely keep busy during these times, but you REALLY need to enjoy Music Education to enjoy this year to year.

The hardest part of the job depends on your position. PT'ers have it easy if they don't have a large vestment. Full-Timers are generally expected to be assistant managers. Managers themselves in busy markets are generally - slaves. They cover any deficiencies the staff can not learn/handle and constantly have initiatives put on them to diseminate to other staff. Meetings and a focus on events all take any time you thought you had to yourself away. Oh and generally the second half of the year vacation is a nono. 

The most enjoyable part of the job is watching kids perform and your days off. Really- enjoy your days off because they may change.  You might get called in to cover, for a meeting, an event, a conference call... who knows.

I absolutely LOVED working here when I started out. Yes, it was a corporate retail job, but underneath all that there was an incredible amount of job satisfaction to be had. I used to boast about it being the only retail environment where you could guarantee that every day you go into work, you're going to change somebody's life.

That has since become painfully untrue. The longer I worked there, and the higher up the chain i climbed, I saw more and more of the soulless, profit-centered culture of the company as a whole. In particular, I was a Store Manager when the current president of the company was hired: the first time in M&A history that an outside candidate had been recruited for such a position, and the first time that both the president and vice-president were not, themselves, musicians.

The difference was stark and immediate: policies and pricing stopped focusing on quality of service, and more on quantity of profit. Our personal sales and lessons goals shot up astronomically, while the actual caliber of both areas fell. Our biggest selling point for lessons had been our highly-qualified teachers, with incredibly strict standards for who we hired and why, and an incredibly attractive pay rate to support it; now, the big draw is that the lessons are the cheapest and most affordable, with the teachers making less money than they would with any other studio, not mention privately.

Their handling of COVID was disastrous on the back end, as well; while the safety measures and policies were quite serious and effective, the expectations and goals were completely unreasonable. Sales goals remained almost unchanged, and lessons and rental goals actually went UP on the same track that they were before things shut down. We were told not to worry, and that these targets were being set as a "shoot for the moon" sort of thing, but no one acknowledged the fact that these goals constituted a major part of our performance review at the end of each year. We were, quite literally, being set up to fail.

I could go on. Their policy about not sitting down during your shift is outdated; their push to sell inferior, proprietary products actively harms public school music programs; they maintain a culture of refusing to disclose employee salaries to one another, which is illegal; truly, the list is nearly endless. What was once an incredibly wonderful, gratifying place to work has become the worst kind of retail prison you can imagine, and it's going to continue to get worse.

Avoid working here unless you have no other option. 

Between the mid 1950's and 2009, the time I started my employment with Music and Arts the company consisted of 90 locations nationwide.  At the time of my layoff in 2014, the company had close to 150 stores.  That's an addition of 66% in 5 years done with minimal infrastructure growth which made getting things done in the individual stores harder and harder as the years went by.  Aside from that, my 5 years of hard work was rewarded with $.30 of a cumulative raise.  The sales associate job is commission based which is all well and good except that each month your store's goal(and therefore your personal goal) is raised by 10% regardless of any economic factors.  Each month you are working your hardest to possibly make your goal and if you make it (13,000 per month on average for a full time employee) your commission is a mere 1%.  You are the horse, and the carrot is about the size of a pencil and always out of reach.

As far as management above the store manager position, the name of the game has always been negative reinforcement. Very rare are managers or below given a pat on the back when it's deserved.  I won't name names, but there are a few very high up employees who very obviously and without shame, do not care about the welfare or dignity of the company's direct employees or contracted teachers.  

To top it off, poor employees somehow are not guaranteed to be fired when it is clearly deserved.  I worked with an individual who was absolutely toxic in the workplace.  This person was a security risk, someone who caused more problems everyone else had to clean up after, had an invasive personality; in short, a liability.  This person was written up three times for a variety of reasons by her direct manager- and what was the District Manager's solution?  To vouch for her to another region for promotion to manager just to get this person out of his hair.  Why not just fire this employee as would have been logical and justified?  Don't ask me-I was just a decent hard working employee totally baffled by the whole situation until they decided they didn't need my talents any longer. ..

If you choose to take employment with Music and Arts (which I strongly suggest you don't) there is an estimated 95% chance that you will be unfulfilled and looking for a job elsewhere within your first 2 years.  That is, if you aren't marked for being let go before then.  Apply at your own risk.

Typical work includes sales/retail, working with rental customers on issues with instruments or payment, and working with lesson students and teachers on scheduling and payment. I've learned a good deal about band and orchestra instruments as well as had great coworkers to work with and bounce ideas for music off of. I've discovered a love of sales here because of great customers that come in that I can sell quality instruments to.
The thing is that the retail workers are always going to be the most customer friendly. Sales support and customer service are often rude towards customers and that leaves us to work out the problems on our own. Given that, there's not a whole lot that the retail workers can do to help customers. I can't think of a single bit of software that Music & Arts has developed that actually works quickly and properly even 60% of the time. 
The company distribution centers send stock that's poorly packaged at best, with fragile items such as bassoon or oboe reeds thrown into boxes with large or heavy items, and stores receiving overstock on products that just aren't sold or insufficient amounts of products that are heavily sold. I can't tell you how many times I've had to turn down customers because we didn't have something in stock that we should have had. Customers don't want to order something from our warehouse, and they shouldn't have to if it's a band book and it's August!
Past the store manager, most of the upper managers like to micromanage when they visit stores which gets very annoying. They like to write you up for mistakes that literally anyone could make because they didn't clearly explain it. Exclusions on discounts and sales are very difficult to follow and keep up with as they can change very quickly.

Working in the actual store was great. I learned excellent customer service skills and really felt the community around and in the store. My coworkers, manager, teachers, and MOST customers were all great people. There are obvious exceptions to this but for the most part the IN STORE interactions were awesome. My coworkers are people I can genuinely consider friends, not just colleagues. HOWEVER  once you start having to deal with the corporate you start to see why the turnover rate is as high as it is. Simply put they talk a big game but can't actually play it how they want you to think. Right now they're putting a HUGE focus on lessons by making store associates take time out of there day to call random rental customers and ask them if they want lessons. What they should be doing is improving the lesson program as there are many issues with the way the company goes about scheduling, make-ups, credits for absences etc. I have also NEVER worked a job in which I felt less trained. I joined during peak season (right at the start of the school year when rentals are happening) and my training consisted of a tour and a "go talk to the customers, find out what they need, and bring it out so they take up less time at the register". Not until a couple weeks in did I actually get any credentials or even training on how to use the register. However, once you get a feel for how things DO work it's really a good environment for the type of person who can stomach the Olympic level corporate gymnastics for the sake of helping out the parent who really wants to give their child a good experience playing an instrument, or the old retired mechanic who wants to pick up guitar. If you can focus on the people in front of you, you'll be happy here.

I worked for this company for almost a decade, and saw the decline over a several year period. What started out as a fulfilling and rewarding job helping musicians, with reasonable sales goals, hours, and expectations quickly evolved into a nightmarish scenario. 

In the past 3 years, the company has:
- Changed the pay structure of its music teachers, cutting their pay by over 40% in a "take it or leave it" scenario
- Brought in new executives that do not understand how music retail functions
- Corporate leadership has turned stores into call centers as opposed to stores, and is not adapting to advancements in technology, online sales, and new sales trends. If you do not hit 10 conversations on the phone per day (not calls, actual spoken conversations) and fill that number into a spread sheet, you get reprimanded.
- Any ideas outside of their curve of expectations is met with retaliation and write-ups
- Managers and store associates are routinely called out and reprimanded in group scenarios, causing high levels of stress.
- Company expects you to use personal devices for zoom meetings, phone meetings, and other activities with no reimbursement or use of company property
- Company is using outdated technology and is trying to continually make catch-ups and band-aid solutions. Ex. Company promised wi-fi in all stores in 2018, that has yet to function. Store associates and teachers rely on wifi from other stores in shopping complex or have to use their own devices as hot spots with no reimbursement.

Overall, while it is fun being with other musicians and helping children and adults with their love of music, I strongly recommend staying away until corporate leadership ditches Guitar Center's model (where all the bad ideas are coming from) and stick to your local mom and pop stores.

I taught at music and arts for 11 years. In that time I watched about a dozen different store managers come and go. As most regular employees, they'd come in with a good attitude, ready to make a difference. Most of them were decent people doing their best... But after a few short months most found themselves worked to death with nothing to show for it. And after feeling completely taken advantage of most leave the company. Some hang on for a promotion but that too comes with the price of further exploitation. As a teacher there was no such thing as full time work, as their paranoid, corporate, guitar center masters were more concerned about the costs of losing students if a teacher were to quit than  rewarding their veteran teachers with more days for their loyalty. Instead, they hire new faces to fill up extra days while long standing and loyal teachers remain part time at best. If all that weren't bad enough, in July this year, after being required to teach online from home since March, while they continued to take their cut (for renting the studio) they gave an ultimatum for all teachers to become employees (formerly self employed contractors) at essentially a 40-50% cut in pay. This was a tremendous slap in the face to all professional instructors in the company. I hope music and arts goes under along with their overextended and equally unethical parent company guitar center. There are locally owned and operated companies that know how to treat their employees and contractors with dignity while still maintaining superior product knowledge and an excellent customer service experience with competitive prices.

The company overall does a great job of being accommodating towards musicians, but in terms of any support from corporate, you are screwed. I have worked here for almost 5 years and every time someone is up for a promotion, and by all accounts has put in the effort and gone above and beyond, will get passed on for external hire. Horrible for anyone looking to move up in their career. 

I will also say any PT or FT sales position will underpay you. The commission structure is not very forgiving and can be based on some unfounded statistics. It's very disappointing because the company asks you to do a whole lot yet the expected returns never match your honest effort. 

They also do not do a great job training employees on the extensive amount of systems, processes, and creative problem solving they expect out of their employees. Part of it is they are constantly changing programs and expectations and keep having to re-train their employees. The other part is, they only give raises once a year, during performance reviews. Even if you get a stellar review, it gives you a CHANCE at max .50 cent raise. Pretty ridiculous considering how much more valuable you get as time goes on and your knowledge increases. Constantly bringing in new hires has stagnated and closed many stores, so it's unfortunate they do not incentivize sticking around. 

Overall, this job is good for a while, but I wouldn't stick around. The corporate side of things really does not support you and almost actively works against their employees. The best-case scenario is you get a strong manager who doesn't need to rely on anybody or anything from corporate. 

I've been with Music & Arts for about 2 years. Worked full-time and got promoted to Store Manager. It was nice for the first few months, my boss was very encouraging, and GAIN is very nice. That's about the only good parts of working here. As soon as I was promoted, I had to hire teachers, sales associates, ETC. I've never done anything like this before. I received NO training for my position. Just kind of jumped right into it. As my time with Music and Arts progressed, the workload has SIGNIFICANTLY increased. I am practically FORCED to micromanage my VERY SMALL TEAM. Every week it seems like a faulty program is added and an extra chore is needed to be done on the daily. This is not a music store, it's a corporate store ONLY looking for how much profit it could make. Nothing feels genuine anymore or for the music, it's discouraged for customers to use all rental credit and encouraged to spend only $100 on a Yamaha instrument. For anyone who has worked here, DM constantly calls every day asking what you're working on, as of right now there's 3-4 meeting per week, It's VERY hard to keep track of everything needed to be done per day. Thirty phone calls per day calling customers about lessons, add all leads into a tracker that barely works. Expected to sign 5 students per day for lessons and make big sales, ETC. I am finding myself on teams and checking my email on my days off. Yeah, don't work here.

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