Jon Suder is one of a dwindling number of Americans who recently bought a new piano.
He wasn’t planning to.
The Fort Worth attorney still beams with pride when showing off the 1922 Steinway baby grand that he and his siblings took lessons on as kids.
But Suder is a big supporter of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, even hosting competitors in his home.
Steinway & Sons moves pianos into every host family home, so the competitors can practice. For the last competition, Steinway brought in one of their Spirio models, and Suder fell in love with the souped-up acoustic player piano.
“There's a computer built into the board, and it's connected to the Steinway server in New York, so I have access to anything Steinway has,” Suder said, demonstrating. “We've got Art Tatum, Duke Ellington …”
Even Van Cliburn himself.
“And the touch and sound of his hands. It’s amazing!”
A family’s entertainment
The piano was once a fixture in middle-class homes.
Sales peaked in 1909, when around 365,000 pianos were sold and there were nearly 300 piano manufacturers operating in the U.S., according to The New York Times.
Data from the BlueBook of Pianos shows a nosedive in sales after the 1929 stock market crash, a pause during World War II and a relatively steady climb into the early ’70s.
“It’s not just something that was a bit of a status symbol for upwardly mobile families. It was actually a source of entertainment,” said Carol Leone, chair of piano studies at Southern Methodist University.
“Now, of course, we have so many other sources of entertainment, but the piano brought families together.”
Radio chipped away at the piano's status as the primary form of home entertainment, and TVs dealt another huge blow. The rise of rock and roll inspired a pivot to guitars, and the debut of electronic keyboards made further cuts into the piano’s primacy.
A “bummer time” for piano
Retail sales of acoustic pianos fell in the 1980s.
Sales have held steady at around 31,000 a year for the past decade, but in 2025, fewer than 18,000 were sold, according to an industry census conducted by Music Trades.
Upright pianos have been largely replaced by digital pianos. Over 188,000 were sold last year, according to the Music Trades census.
Combined, that brought total piano retail sales above 205,000 in 2024. Consider that the population has grown to nearly 342 million today from approximately 92 million in the instrument’s heyday in the early 1900s, according to the U.S. Census, and it’s clear that the proportion of piano buyers is lower today.
“This is a bummer time for the piano industry. It has certainly not been great, and that's even pre-tariff,” said Hannah Beckett, a piano technician and the editor and publisher of Piano Buyer Press.
“Tariffs are going to be rough. I mean, pianos are not cheap. New [acoustic] pianos take a year to make, and there's really no way to make them all in one country. I mean we rely on wood and felt from Germany in order to make a quality product. There is no one country that can produce everything.”
So who’s buying pianos?
Professional musicians, concert halls and music schools will always need acoustic pianos, said Anthony Gilroy, vice president of marketing and communications at Steinway.
And of course, some families with children are still in the market.
Many young children are still encouraged to start piano lessons even if they are not encouraged to pursue music professionally, said SMU’s Leone.
“It's still seen as a sort of foundation. Piano is a foundational instrument for music study,” she said. “However, it's my experience that many parents of American students believe that music is not going to be a lucrative profession for their children, and therefore, even though they might advocate for them to study the piano, it's seen as a supplement to their education.”
Americans are still studying piano, but over the past two or three decades, Leone has noticed that they tend to make up a smaller portion of students pursuing piano studies in college or graduate school.
“I think the main interest in the piano has largely shifted from Western Europe and the United States to Asia,” Leone said. “It's been traditionally strong in Eastern Europe and Russia, and it continues to be.
“I think that in Asia, it's culturally very important. Musical achievement is important, and therefore music education is important.”
Take China for example. Less than a decade ago, it had an estimated 40 million piano students compared to approximately six million in the United States, according to The New York Times.
But that market, once seen as a beacon of hope for the instrument, faltered last year.
Circulating “useless old pianos”
And many American kids leave the piano for other instruments. Or for sports. That was the case for Eleonora Grokhovskaya’s daughter.
“I purchased this piano probably 10 years ago because my daughter wanted to learn how to play the piano, and when we reached out to the piano teacher she said that she would not accept us as students if we only have a keyboard. So her requirement was to have an actual instrument.”
Now her daughter is in college, so Grokhovskaya listed the Yamaha baby grand for $10,000.
“This piano since then was the most expensive furniture in my house,” she said. “I decided I was going to sell it, which would help me pay some of her tuition.”
Sales from person to person on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace are harder to track at scale.
Some with newer instruments, like Grokhovskaya, are trying to sell their pianos, but there are also many people who are offering their old uprights for free.
“You see a lot of that, and unfortunately, I think it creates the perception that pianos are dying and everyone's just trying to get rid of them,” said Gilroy from Steinway.
“They're hard to move. They're not easy to throw out, and people take out ads and try to get people to come pick it up for free, and these pianos really aren't worth anything, because they're so past their usable lifespan.”
The lifespan of pianos is something that many consumers aren’t educated on, Beckett, a piano technician, concurred.
“A lot of us miss that memo. Instead of just taking them to the dump, which is something that, for some reason, Americans just really can't handle, they're trying to offload it to someone else. So that just means we're circulating useless old pianos that, you know, shouldn't be in the market anymore,” she said.
“Everyone's picking up these old pianos, calling a piano technician who then comes and says, ‘Oh, I'm so sorry, you got a piano that can't be fixed, can't be tuned. You’ve got to try again.’ And a lot of times they do the exact same thing. They post it right back on Facebook Marketplace and then somebody else does the exact same thing.”
The length of the piano’s lifespan, unsurprisingly, depends on the quality and how well it was maintained, and the type of piano. Uprights tend to have shorter lifespans than grand pianos.
“Even a well-built Steinway will eventually need to be replaced, 80, 90 years. If it's properly maintained, it doesn't last for years — it lasts literally for generations,” Gilroy said. “But uprights, especially if they were cheaply made, don't really have a superlong lifespan. When that piano has been used for 25, 30 years, it's not a very usable piano anymore.”
Making moves and memories
Diane Bolton can understand why it’s so hard for people to say goodbye to old pianos.
She and her husband, Gordon Bolton, own Piano Movers of Texas, which moves around 1,600 pianos a year.
“The lead guys, they can look at a piano leg and know what kind of piano it is, whether it's a Yamaha or Steinway. They know the ins and outs of them,” Diane Bolton said.
More than half of the pianos they move are family heirlooms.
Clients might be downsizing their home, upgrading their instrument or temporarily putting their piano into storage.
Brenda Hardy is one of those clients. Now retired, she and her husband are planning to move into a smaller space.
“I prayed on it and prayed on it. At church I mentioned that … maybe I could donate to the church or someone that engages with children because it gave us so much joy — just indescribable joy — when our grandchildren would play on it and play with us,” she said.
A church friend said her sister-in-law teaches piano and needed a new one after losing hers to a fire.
“It all was in perfect God's alignment,” Hardy said.
The Boltons are optimistic about the piano’s future.
“Of course, we're right in the thick of this, but to me, there's still piano teachers, there's some students, there are still pianos. … I think it's still very much alive for kids to play piano and I think it's a big part of a lot of people's lives,” Diane Bolton said.
For many of the people who are saying goodbye to their instrument for one reason or another, it can be emotional.
“Pianos aren’t just instruments,” she said. “They are family members. They are memories.”
Arts Access is an arts journalism collaboration powered by The Dallas Morning News and KERA.
This community-funded journalism initiative is funded by the Better Together Fund, Carol & Don Glendenning, City of Dallas OAC, The University of Texas at Dallas, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Eugene McDermott Foundation, James & Gayle Halperin Foundation, Jennifer & Peter Altabef and The Meadows Foundation. The News and KERA retain full editorial control of Arts Access’ journalism.
