How many mandolin players in the world?

[fatt-dad]

this web site has 50,000 members. Some of us are very passionate amateurs. Some of us are members, 'cause we want to know what to do with Grandpa's old Gibson. Even with 50,000 members that actually play, it's a snapshot of the the overall population who play. I mean after all, it's a forum in English!

If the actual body of pickers were four-fold the 'cafe's membership that'd return 200,000, eh?

I'd expect Tobin's approach is equally scientific?

f-d

[JeffD]

How many mandolin players in the world?

Most of them I would bet. Some few are out of this world.

[f5loar]

Hard to get a number there but I've often wondered who is buying all these mandolins assuming they are becoming mandolin players. There is a lot of independent makers putting out 10 to 100 per year per maker. Bigger companies likely doubling that figure. Now add in the imports coming in a a triple rate of manufacture per company. That's a lot of mandolins assuming they eventually get sold. Add in the 1000's that suffer MAS and own 2 to 10 mandolins. 1000's that own 10 to 25 mandolins and those few hundreds that own 25 to 100 mandolins. 300,000 mandolin pickers world wide sounds possible.

[JeffD]

I wonder. Have you included bowl back players in your estimating?

I have often thought that world wide over half of the mandolin players are bowl back players. Likely well over half. If we stick to bowls that are clearly mandolin family, (so include things like liuto canabile, but perhaps exclude things like the Greek bouzouki, lute, oud, theorbo), I wonder if the numbers might be higher.

[Tobin]

I wonder. Have you included bowl back players in your estimating?

I have often thought that world wide over half of the mandolin players are bowl back players. Likely well over half. If we stick to bowls that are clearly mandolin family, (so include things like liuto canabile, but perhaps exclude things like the Greek bouzouki, lute, oud, theorbo), I wonder if the numbers might be higher.

I have no doubt that the majority of non-US mandolin players are bowlback players. But I don't think their overall numbers are very high. It is a quaint folk instrument that hasn't (to my knowledge) had any popular resurgence in modern times.

If bowlback players were such a large market, equal to or greater than Gibson-style mandolin players, why aren't there more modern bowlbacks being made? I would expect the Asian manufacturers to be churning them out at the same levels as F-styles. Where are they?

[Dagger Gordon]

I have no doubt that the majority of non-US mandolin players are bowlback players.

I'm not sure on what basis you say that, or indeed who exactly you are thinking of.
You don't see many bowl-backs nowadays in Scotland or Ireland, for example.

And why do you think people from other countries would not be playing Asian-made flat back mandolins?


Here is a nice flatback made by a man in Crete which was apparently made for someone in Singapore!

You will also note that there are various instruments hanging on the wall, including at least one bowlback mandolin. Crete is somewhere where there are a lot of round back instruments, particularly the lauto which is larger than the mandolin, but it seems to me that both flat and bowl back mandolins are found there.

[mobi]

I have no doubt that the majority of non-US mandolin players are bowlback players.

Beg to differ. I have been to few mandolin shops in UK, Italy, Germany and they are full of flat back mandolins!

[JeffD]

I wonder about that. Of course the problem is selective exposure. Most of the non-US mandolin players I have heard or seen or watched have been classical players, and so the bowl predominates.

[Billkwando]

It is a quaint folk instrument that hasn't (to my knowledge) had any popular resurgence in modern times.

Does Losing My Religion count?

[JeffD]

It is a quaint folk instrument that hasn't (to my knowledge) had any popular resurgence in modern times.

You mean like the giant resurgence in other mandolins?

Lets get some perspective. Lets assume the estimate of 300,000 people is accurate. If a certain television show were only watched only by 300,000 people world wide, the chances are you and I would have never heard of it. There are delicacies eaten by more than 300,000 people world wide that we have never heard of and will never get to try. 300,000 would be great attendance for a single Broadway Musical, in a single theater, in its first season. A musical that most of us never heard of.

In my regular job I have been doing some work with extreme vacuums, very small numbers of molecules in relatively large spaces. At those small numbers the physics really seems kind of weird, because of what I am used to in the macroscopic dense stuff filled world. I think the same is true with mandolins. All the mental tools we use for discerning cultural trends and estimating are suspect when dealing with such low numbers.

Like we say here at home, three mandolin players can't meet at the same venue, because if some tragedy were to happen it would wipe out over half the mandolin players we know.

[Tobin]

Does Losing My Religion count?

Did it spur some sort of bowlback revival that none of us have ever heard of?

I just did a quick Google search for that one, and pretty much everybody that is playing it is doing it on a modern (non-bowlback) mandolin. It may have helped with mandolin popularity in general, but since my comment that you were responding to was specific to bowlbacks, I don't see any evidence that it did anything for bowlback popularity.

I suppose I could be way off on Europeans playing bowlbacks. I was trying to account for all the traditional bowlbacks that are still out there from centuries past, being played for traditional music, and not necessarily tying it to recent sales of new mandolins. Even if it's not classical music, it seems that most of the videos I've seen from Eastern Europe, as well as portions of Western Europe (Italy, mainly) are bowlbacks. I admit, though, that it's not my focus and selective exposure (like Jeff said) is at play. It could very well be that flatbacks are more popular. I really wouldn't know how to get a handle on the real numbers - this is all guesswork, remember?

[Billkwando]

Did it spur some sort of bowlback revival that none of us have ever heard of?

Ah, yes! You were talking about bowlbacks, but when you said, "It is a quaint folk instrument that hasn't (to my knowledge) had any popular resurgence in modern times." I didn't realize you were classifying the bowlback as a different instrument, partially because the thread as a whole is about mandolins in general, and partially because it really isn't.

My mistake.

[Dr H]

Has there been any statistics collected on numbers?

Of course it is impossible to count the numbers but it would be interesting to see some numbers may be broken down by country, region etc.

The stats of mandolin sales can be useful (if available).

There's a census coming up in the US in about 3 years. Contact the Census Bureau, and maybe you can get them to include "mandolin" on their forms, perhaps as an ethnicity.

[Dr H]

my purely speculative conclusion is that there are somewhere around 450,000 mandolin players world-wide. Tops. A more realistic number would be somewhere around 300,000.

Y'know... That's almost the population of Iceland.

Shouldn't we have our own country?

[allenhopkins]

Five -- one to hold the light bulb, four to rotate the ladder...

Oh wait, that's another topic altogether.

[Dr H]

Has there been any statistics collected on numbers?

Of course it is impossible to count the numbers but it would be interesting to see some numbers may be broken down by country, region etc.

The stats of mandolin sales can be useful (if available).

Now that I think about it, the answer to that depends on what a 'mandolin' is.

[Bertram Henze]

What do you mean, "the world"?
This planet?
Milky Way?
Local Group?
Laniakea?

[MandoGDAE]

I happen to personally know all the mandolin players in the world. There are 312,842.

[David Lewis]

We've had two very reasonable figures. 3000000 and 2.5 million.

I should think halfway between and then minus 200000. So, around 10000000

This would include those who bought mandolin, played it twice and claim to play, those who don't own one, but have played one because they think it's a little guitar as well as more serious players.

Still seems a bit high...

[Bren]

Just count all the strings and divide by eight.

Then multiply by 3 because MAS.

So the answer is 3/8.

[mandroid]

42

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrase...thing_.2842.29

[Tom C]

Well, there's thirteen hundred and fifty two Guitar pickers in Nashville...When Nashville Cats was written.
What was the ratio of guitar pickers there to rest of the world?
What was the ratio of mando players to guitar players?
How many guitar players today?
You can multiply by a factor of how more or less the mando has become popular
Take that ratio and multiply to get mando players.

[dwc]

Do we have an estimate for how many guitar players there are in the world? If so, and if we make the following assumption, "The ratio of the number of musicians that join the dominant musical forum for that instrument relative to the number of total players of that instrument worldwide remains constant irrespective of the instrument," then we can use the number of guitarists in the world, the membership at AGF and the membership here to calculate the total number of mandolinists in the world. But that requires a pretty big assumption.

[JeffD]

We've had two very reasonable figures. 3000000 and 2.5 million.

For perspective, I have seen estimates of the number of guitar players from 50 million to 250 million. And one estimate I saw claimed over a billion.

[Tobin]

Well, there's thirteen hundred and fifty two Guitar pickers in Nashville...When Nashville Cats was written.
What was the ratio of guitar pickers there to rest of the world?
What was the ratio of mando players to guitar players?
How many guitar players today?
You can multiply by a factor of how more or less the mando has become popular
Take that ratio and multiply to get mando players.

I did the math based on your formula, and I have come up with 300,000.

This isn't school, so I'm not going to show my work.