How to be controversial in the Hang Drum world?
When I started playing hang drum, I was mesmerized (like many) by the simplicity of this new instrument, which was invented 70 years ago somewhere in the Caribbean. I knew instantly I needed to have one… so what does a 21st century schizoid man in need do — opens a browser window and starts googling: ”buy hang drum”.
In the early phase of my reasearch I learned that the hang drum was in fact a minor Swiss design tweak made to the Jamaican steelpans, but it didn’t matter. The tweak was enough to spark my interest in the instrument, which I knew only from the annoyingly happy music that is often played with it (and the crappy and useless synth presets, that nobody actually uses, but which are easy to program because of the simple mathematic relation between the oscillations).
Anyway, besides my taste for good music, a decade later the hang drum has discreetly revolutionized the musical instrument business in the 21st century with the clever use of internet and scarcity principle.
YouTube is full of poor quality videos, shot in exotic locations around the world, that show the mystical metal drum being played by introverted random hippies in black hoodies. Against all odds, these videos became very popular. Later the humankind saw these videos evolve into something completely else, like an Asian woman playing an out of tune hang drum. The point is, the quality of the videos or the music performed couldn’t outshine the magic of the hang drum. A video after another went viral and each of them was more than capable of incepting a buyer’s desire inside the head of any wannabe musician, who had failed before at learning traditional instruments.
In 2017 every second high school dropout hippie either wants a hang drum or is thinking about wanting one. Yet in reality the instrument is still almost impossible to find. Most of the hang drum sales happen on the black market and only a few instruments end up in traditional music instrument stores. Usually getting your product in the stores has been a good thing for small businesses, but somehow this unorthodox business avoiding strategy has worked in favor of hang drum manufacturers. Some builders tend to express anticapitalist attitudes, but in truth they are promoting anarcho-capitalism, where everyone prices their goods however they like (and pay no taxes).
While the big guitar manufacturers like Fender and Gibson are in debt and numerous synthesizer companies are racing to develop cheaper and more compact analog synths based on outdated technologies, the hang drum builders around the world are charging 2000–3000 dollars for prototypes — and everyone is perfectly happy, because in the end the customer is always right.
When it comes to hang drums, there seems to be a paradox in the law of supply and demand. Five years ago the number of hang drum builders could be counted with two hand fingers. Today nobody knows anymore how many builders there are, but the number is probably 178. This means that the supply of hang drums has spiked with at least tenfold increase in production. Yet, somehow this has failed to lower the prices — in fact, the median price of a sold instrument has gone up with at least 1500 dollars in 15 years!
The triumph of the hang drum is a school book example of how to exploit a niche market. In my humble view, everyone who is looking for business strategy inspiration should be researching what happened on the handpan.org forums approx 2010–2015. It is very likely that everyone who created an account during that time, ended up spending at least 2000 dollars in hang drums or hapi drums. (There are even alarming reports of collectors, who have more than three hang drums in their collection. Seriously, who needs three hang hang hang?)
But, obviously, money is not what counts the most here. In the heart of the worldwide hang drum community has always been deep, shared appreciation and love for music. Because there is nothing cooler than being a musician who plays a weird instrument that nobody knows. You are always the center of the party. You always get the most attention at gigs… if you can get gigs, that is… and even if you don’t get gigs, you can always go busking, in which case you will make shitloads of money just by looking cool with your brand new second hand hang drum that you got from Ebay with your mom’s credit. And who knows, if you are lucky, maybe someone will film you on Youtube and you will be the next viral Youtube hang drum star, just like Manu Delago, Dante Bucci, Daniel Waples, Davide Swarup, The Hang Massive, David Kuckhermann, Yuki Koshimoto, Adrian Portia, Golshifteh Farani, Carlos “Kabeção” Rodrigues, Sam Maher and the Georgian prime minister before you!
P.s. There is also another hungry economy lurking beneath the hang drum industry: legal advocacies who specialize in the patent law. In case you represent an advocacy of this sorts and your client sent you to read this blog post, then you should understand that this text is satire. And you should probably quit doing what you are doing, because your work is harming a vibrant community of instrument builders and musicians. Why not use your education to fight the nazis instead?
P.p.s. If you enjoy this blog, please share it with your friends and enemies and consider buying my albums at http://kumea.bandcamp.com! It will help me to focus on what matters the most: making funny memes for the Handpan Memes FB-page and getting rich!
P.p.p.s. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, remember, always stay positive! If you don’t yet have a hang drum, because you are too poor, you can just manifest one by posting this picture of Davide Swarup above your bed and everytime you go to sleep you say to yourself “one day I will wake up as a hang drum player” and one morning the Universe will just give you a hang drum (probably only 1st gen tho) because you really deserve it! Good luck everyone! May the angels make you rich and prosperous!
