First and foremost, we hope you and your loved ones are safe and well at this time.

As a community we have made great strides in combatting the threat of Covid19 and economically we hope that a total shut down will not be necessary, as it has been in other countries.

To this point, our industry has been able to trade and provide musical instruments to a market and community hungry for either home entertainment, home based education or simply a distraction in a world of isolation. Our businesses have been faced with unprecedented challenges, but have adapted to continue to serve customers, and in the case of March purchases/sales it was like Christmas trading from years ago for many MI businesses.

Music making is indeed important at this time, particularly for health and education. We have promoted that the industry is open and operating via our consumer online channels, and we’ve reported on how some members are doing.

A few weeks ago we sent with our best wishes the sentiment, that we as a committee would be a sounding board for the industry during this pandemic. Gladly, it seems that many have been too busy to be needing much guidance in addition to what has been provided. We hope it remains the case.

We have distributed our Covid-19 resources and information pack to both members and non-members. We will continue to seek to find ways of supporting the industry during these challenging times. This week a JobKeeper Guide was sourced from the AMA’s auditors and is on our website.

The Melbourne Guitar Show was postponed to from August to October 2020 and we now have contingency dates reserved depending on the lay of the land for March 2021. We are leaning towards March timing as factory production gets back to full strength and exhibitors will hopefully be on a stronger financial footing.

We’ve used our work from home time to develop the next funding application to continue our NAMM Foundation partnership with the Make Music Alliance and the staging of Make Music Day here in Australia joining others around the world in the development of an event that celebrates music making.

The 2019 Market Report is about to be laid out with the 2019 numbers available on the website, demonstrating a healthy growth in our industry of some 9% over the previous year and 14% over the year before.

Whilst the AMA is operating on the smell of an oily rag and we’ve minimised our activities during the pandemic, we want to be in a position to continue to serve our industry both now and when better times return.

Michael Shade

AMA President