How many mandolin players in the world?

[mobi]

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).

[Randi Gormley]

i think you first have to define "players," no? Do you count people who bought a mandolin 30 years ago and plunked at it once? Or people whose first instrument is mandolin who may be better known for other instruments? I can see endless definition arguments before you'd even begin to figure out how to count.....

[Seter]

As a cartographer this is an interesting topic to me. It would be interesting to see mandolincafe membership mapped worldwide, normalized by country population. Data can be mapped in other interesting ways too I'm sure.

[MikeZito]

Unfortunately, I would think that mapping out worldwide Cafe members would be useless to a statistician, simply because (unless I am missing something) 'membership' is limited only to those who can speak English.

[Hudmister]

How about, how many mandolin players in the USA? Maybe include Canada also. I doubt Mandolin Café membership would be a useful indicator as certainly not all mandolin players are Café members.

[Tobin]

An unanswerable question, of course. But maybe we could back into a reasonable estimate or educated guess? Or at least a ballpark range with just enough fuzzy math behind it to satisfy modern journalistic integrity (which is to say, make things up).

Some quick Googling shows that in the US and UK, somewhere around 25% of adults play musical instruments. For a nation of approximately 326 million people, that's about 81.5 million people who play something. When you try to look up statistics on what people play, the mandolin isn't even listed. The vast majority go to piano/keyboard, guitar, etc. My wild guess is that less than one-half of one percent of musical instrument players in the US are mandolin players. That would mean we have somewhere around 400,000 mandolin players in the US. It still seems like a high number, though.

Considering that the US accounts for nearly half of world-wide musical instrument purchases as a whole, and probably 90% of mandolin purchases (yeah, I grabbed that out of thin air), 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.

[Mike Stewart]

Some quick Googling shows that in the US and UK, somewhere around 25% of adults play musical instruments.

Though I have nothing with which to back up my skepticism, I highly doubt the number is that high. One out of every four adults I know play a musical instrument? Maybe one out of those four might have played an instrument at one time, say, in high school. But one in four play a song, again just making up criteria, once a month or more? I'd bet it's closer to 5%. In other words, amongst the variety of adults that come to my mind, a very few could pick up any instrument of their choice and play a song on it right now, cold. That's what I define as "play (a) musical instrument". Playing oboe in the high school band twenty years ago doesn't count.

Me, I don't really care how many mandolin players there are in the world. I have no plans to start a business catering to mandolin players, so worldwide market is unimportant. As long as quality instruments are available for sale, and I have other musicians to play with once in a while, I don't need safety in numbers. Even if it comes down to Gibson being the only mandolin manufacturer remaining, and they only make one model, as long as that one model is a good one and as long as there's a guitar/banjo/fiddle player who will play with me, I'm good.

[Tobin]

Though I have nothing with which to back up my skepticism, I highly doubt the number is that high. One out of every four adults I know play a musical instrument? Maybe one out of those four might have played an instrument at one time, say, in high school. But one in four play a song, again just making up criteria, once a month or more? I'd bet it's closer to 5%.

It really depends on what age group we're talking about, and obviously how we define "playing an instrument". But this source seems to show that it's as high as 20% for younger adults and as low as 7% for older adults. I saw another source which suggested the overall percentage (including adults and children) was 29%. This source says 34% of adults in the UK currently play an instrument. I figured 25% was a ballpark figure for overall numbers, as a percentage of population in the western world. Is it right? I dunno. But I'll bet it's higher than 5%.

[MikeZito]

How many of us know somebody who said, 'Yes, I can play the piano, guitar, tuba, etc. - and then you heard them play and quickly realized that they have very little clue of what they are doing? Hence the problem of self-identification that Mike Stewart mentioned.

[Tobin]

Being a competent player is a whole different conversation, and is quite subjective. I may not consider a professional mandolinist to be in the same league as a newbie who can't play a chop chord, but I still consider them both players as long as it is something they are actively pursuing.

[George R. Lane]

Hopefully enough to drown out all the banjo players.

[trabb]

Well I'd like to see this go even further - breakdown of mandola and mandocello players as well. The latter could probably done on a U.S. map with pushpins every few inches apart

[Folkmusician.com]

I have never seen mandolin data broken out, but it should be easy enough to get an estimate with some research. Since we have statistics for other instruments such as guitar, we could use string sales, web searches, or any guitar stats to get a better idea of mandolin numbers. I like the idea of strings, because that suggests active players as would enrollment for online lessons.

If D'Addario would volunteer some numbers....

I have no doubt that there is a low number of active players. It has declined in the last decade.

[Mandobart]

All of them. There are currently no known mandolin players on other worlds. Seriously, a similar question came up on the AGF which led to this answer (260 million guitar players). If there are as many suggest 100 guitar players for every mandolin player (it takes that many to be heard over all our mandos, which I understand are all cannons and banjo-killers) that means there are 2.6 million mandolin players in the world. Including these folks.

There are 10 mandolin players for every mandola player, and 100 mandolin players for every mandocello player. So there are 260,000 mandola players and only 26,000 mandocellists. So some like me are a crack within a niche I guess.

[jaycat]

Enough! Or, too much... as Billy Blake put it.

[Seter]

The MandolinCafe staff have made some maps before, I remember seeing one of France and one of India specifically. Obviously they have their caveats etc, but it is a wealth of data that some interesting findings could be gleaned from.

[Austin Bob]

I don't know.

[JH Murray]

In 2016 2,630,950 guitars were sold in the USA, according to Musictrades.com . 1,498,700 of those were acoustic or a/e. 962,325 were electrics, of which 120k were basses. 2016 was a good year, with sales increasing by 6%.

The Musical Instruments Report found at http://www.mainstreammanagement.com/...nstruments.pdf
states that in 2008, Guitars were 84% of all stringed instruments sold in the USA. Other fretted string instruments were 12% of sales, and non-fretted string instruments were 4%.

So if 2.7 million guitars = 84% of the instruments sold, then 380k other fretted instruments were sold.
Most of those will be ukuleles.

This is just a few of the numbers I've been able to gather. How it all comes together, I don't know how different 2008 is from 2016.

[JH Murray]

In 2016, 1.4 million ukuleles were sold! These numbers don't jive with the 2008 figures.

[mrmando]

Just count all the strings and divide by eight.

[Folkmusician.com]

Best selling mandolin on Amazon sells approx 2500 per year.
Best selling guitar 11000.

This doesn't give an accurate view though.

The second best selling guitar, 10k per year.
Third: 7k

Second best selling mandolin 1100
So mandolins taper off very quickly and there are far fewer offerings.

[Dagger Gordon]

Remember this is an English speaking forum and may not attract mandolinists from other countries.

There are mandolin orchestra in places you might not immediately think of, such as Madeira for example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJaINsX_UuI

or Holland
https://www.facebook.com/hetconsort/

And I can think of at least two mandolin festivals in France, although the Lunel oneseems to have stopped now.
http://www.mandopolis.org/
http://www.mandolinesdelunel.com/2015/accueil/

[Ivan Kelsall]

From George Lane - "Hopefully enough to drown out all the banjo players." You go & stand in the corner right now sir !!.

I s'ppose this could be the dream of some mandolin players !,
Ivan


PS - I never did find out who the mandolin player on this LP was - or any of the musicians for that matter !!. The banjo in the middle is Roger Sprung's - but did he play on the LP ???.

[Mandoplumb]

An unanswerable question, of course. But maybe we could back into a reasonable estimate or educated guess? Or at least a ballpark range with just enough fuzzy math behind it to satisfy modern journalistic integrity (which is to say, make things up).
Some quick Googling shows that in the US and UK, somewhere around 25% of adults play musical instruments. For a nation of approximately 326 million people, that's about 81.5 million people who play something. When you try to look up statistics on what people play, the mandolin isn't even listed. The vast majority go to piano/keyboard, guitar, etc. My wild guess is that less than one-half of one percent of musical instrument players in the US are mandolin players. That would mean we have somewhere around 400,000 mandolin players in the US. It still seems like a high number, though.
Considering that the US accounts for nearly half of world-wide musical instrument purchases as a whole, and probably 90% of mandolin purchases (yeah, I grabbed that
out of thin air), 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.

Tobin, I like the way you did this, very scientific, mathematically arrived at 450,000 then decided that was too high pulled 300,000 out if the air and went with it. Do you write for newspapers?

[Tobin]

Tobin, I like the way you did this, very scientific, mathematically arrived at 450,000 then decided that was too high pulled 300,000 out if the air and went with it. Do you write for newspapers?

Hey, I did warn you what I was going to do in my first paragraph!