The annual convention of the Percussive Arts Society is happening this weekend in Indianapolis.
PASIC features lots of workshops, performances and a gigantic marketplace where drum companies display their latest releases of new product.
I've never been and likely won't ever make it to a PAS Convention. But I'm confident in saying that at least half of what's new on the market this fall will have been manufactured in China.
(You can read my previous posts here about which companies are making their own products in-house, and which are having them made and branded by juggernaut factories in China. The last time I went into specifics, guys from the two biggest US drum companies went all pitbull on me in the socials and it wore me out.)
That drum companies feel compelled to mass-produce cheap pads overseas, mark up the retail by several hundred percentage points and then massage the socials to hype their pads so that kids will want to buy them, is just a sad reality of today's practice pad market. It has been a sad reality of retail for a long time, and there is little you or I can do about it except to point out when things go sideways.
Case in point:
A well-known marching drum instructor and clinician had a signature pad that was produced for several years by a US company. That company made the pads in small quantities in-house in the US and they were immensely popular among marching drummers. The pad was very well made and retailed for a little over $100, a price deemed a little high by the dictates of the modern practice pad market, but understandable because the pad was made in small batches by the guy who was selling it and there wouldn't be a ton of profit in that. (Apparently, you're not supposed to turn a huge profit if you make what you sell. Who knew?)
It became one of the most popular pads in that maker's catalog.
This fall, that instructor told his small US maker to drop his signature pad. He was signing on with a larger company as one of their official artists, and the new company would be offering his pad going forward.
The catch? The company this instructor has jumped to doesn't actually make any of its own products. They are all made by other manufacturers and embossed with the company's name and logo. In the case of practice pads, the pads for the new company are all made by Hanflag in China. Hanflag makes pads and rebrands them for a bunch of American-based companies including RCP, Salyers and others.
When you have one factory making products for three or five different companies, those companies have to come up with ways to differentiate from each other in order to sell more units. If they can't find a way to differentiate, then negotiations must be made for one company to drop a pad design and allow another company to market that design under their name.
(This has just happened with Salyers and RCP, both of which produced an adjustable snare pad that was made by Hanflag -- which also sells the pad under the brand name HUN in Asian markets. Salyers realized that it could not differentiate enough from RCP, and since RCP brought out the pad in the US market first, they are keeping it in their lineup while Salyers has discontinued it. I wasn't a fly on the wall, but I have friends who work in the industry and they have confirmed that this is basically what happened. Good luck finding a Salyers "Stealth" pad now. They're gone. But you can get the exact same design from RCP, which sells it as their "Active Snare" pad.)
What's so maddening about this is that the production is not at all sustainable; the pads use materials that are redundant and harmful for the environment and the factory has to ship them halfway around the globe to get them into the hands of kids in the US market. None of this is good. What makes it worse is when a design is copied -- or altered just enough to avoid copyright infringement -- so that an artist can shift his allegiance from a small-batch craft maker to a larger mass-producer which doesn't even make their own product.
This conversation has already made its way to the socials, and the new design of the pad mentioned above has just been released at PASIC, so I'm not revealing anything new here.
Exhibit A: the original design, made in the US from sustainable, environmentally sensitive materials. The practice rim went all the way around and the top surface had a laminate laid over recycled rubber. A second surface affixed to the bottom provided a different feel and made the pad versatile.
Exhibit B: The new version of this design, altered enough to avoid legal concerns and mass-produced in China from materials that are very likely not as environmentally friendly. The practice rim goes only halfway around the surface, and there doesn't seem to be a laminate (though I won't be surprised if one is sold separately at a premium price).
This new version of the design retails for around $100. Consider how little it costs to make this mass-produced version and you realize that a great deal more of the money will be pure profit for someone who didn't make the pad. (By the rules of this game, the man who owns the company is the one who deserves all the profit he can get. Because he was smart enough to get someone else to make the product for him at pennies on the dollar.)
The instructor/clinician is a brilliant drummer, has chops for days and also publishes instruction books that are becoming very popular among marching drummers. (The new company will distribute his books, which is an added bonus for someone who had been self-distributing before.) I have no ill will for the drummer at all and wish him well.
What bothers me is that the marketplace as it is currently designed and managed forces people to make decisions based on economics first, and other considerations fall much farther down the ladder. This isn't one drummer's fault. It is the fault of a kind of capitalism that insists on endless growth for a company's survival.
The kids who will buy this pad won't care. They're kids who just want to chop on an awesome pad designed by an awesome drummer. Never mind how the pad came to be what it is today, or where and how it was made. If you try to educate the kids about this whole scene, they will resent you for harshing their vibe. That's just the way it is.
But the state of the drum marketplace today is just so predatory and wasteful, and that is why I've largely turned my attention to collecting and restoring vintage pads. Every old pad I bring back to life is a pad that won't go to the landfill, and instead can be handed to a young drummer to be enjoyed for many more years. I can live with that, and I can live with never stepping foot into another trade show exhibit hall for the rest of my life.
Chop on.
(NOTE: If you wanted the earlier version of this pad, don't worry! The original US maker of this pad has turned to making custom pads on demand, and if you can live without the signature you can probably get something very close to the original design of the pad above.)
No comments:
Post a Comment