Brands Featured

  • gear4music.com
  • gak.co.uk
  • juno.co.uk
  • richtonemusic.co.uk
  • normans.co.uk
  • pmtonline.co.uk
  • djkit.com
  • reidys.com
  • guitarguitar.co.uk
  • thediscdjstore.com
  • bopdj.com
  • whybuynew.co.uk
  • peachguitars.com
  • djsuperstore.com
  • coda-music.com
  • grahamrusselldrums.com
  • thomann.de
  • rubadub.co.uk
  • musicroom.com
  • drumshack.co.uk
  • guitarvillage.co.uk
  • hobgoblin.com
  • yamahamusiclondon.com
  • thedjshop.co.uk
  • westenddj.co.uk
  • kennysmusic.co.uk
  • electromarket.co.uk
  • rimmersmusic.co.uk
  • millersmusic.co.uk
  • reverb.com
  • dv247.com
  • coachhousepianos.co.uk
  • andertons.co.uk
  • forsyths.co.uk
  • drumshop.co.uk
  • ableton.com
  • simplysoundandlighting.co.uk
  • jgwindows.com
  • fender.com
  • yamaha.com
  • bassdirect.co.uk
  • roland.com
  • guitarcenter.com
  • johnpacker.co.uk
  • matchettsmusic.com
  • broughtonpianos.co.uk
  • eastwoodguitars.com
  • caswells-strings.co.uk

Show More Brands

What to expect inside

  • 2022 Music retailers report front cover
  • 2022 Music retailers report visibility year on year page
  • 2022 Music retailers report winners and losers page

Latest insights

  • fender.com tops the brand reach score table
  • For the third year running, gear4music.com is ranked No.1 for overall organic visibility
  • fender.com, yamaha.com and hobgoblin.com have lost out on significant portions of their organic visibility in the last 12 months
  • gear4music.com has the second best Trustpilot profile.

10 minutes Reading time

1-50 Brands ranked

Report Updated February 2022

The 2022 Music Stores Salience Index. What is it?

The music stores Salience index is a comprehensive report of the UK’s biggest online music stores. We source the best ranking brands across core music store categories (think guitars, piano’s, drums etc.). After sourcing the brands we run data across 10 key search performance metrics and rank them on a scale of 1-50.

We make these reports with CEO’s, Marketing Manager s & Senior eComm’s in mind. We hope you can understand your brand’s performance over the last 12 months relative to your closest competition.

 

Who’s leading the UK Music Stores Space?

Firstly, let’s look at how we gauge who is leading: Greatest share of voice & visibility in search engines.

To do this we use Searchmetrics. They call it visibility score. Read about its details here.

The top 10 brands with the highest score are:

  1. gear4music.com
  2. thomann.de
  3. andertons.co.uk
  4. pmtonline.co.uk
  5. guitarguitar.co.uk
  6. fender.com
  7. gak.co.uk
  8. yamaha.com
  9. reverb.com
  10. juno.co.uk

Congrats to these brands, it takes a lot of effort to get to this position.

A new contender: reverb.com

A new entrant to the top 10 club is reverb.com. In the last 12 months, they’ve climbed an impressive 16 places up our organic visibility table. From 25 to 9, an overall growth of 343% YoY. Seriously impressive stuff. If they can maintain this sort of trajectory, you’ll be seeing them in the top 5 come next year’s report.

 

What other brands are on a great course of growth?

Looking away from exclusively the 10 brands, across the sector there are many more brands with winning approaches. These are:

  1. Gear4music (+28% Growth YoY)
  2. Thomann (+52%)
  3. GuitarGuitar (+22%)
  4. The DJ shop (+101%)

Interestingly, ¾ here are in the top 10 most visible brands. A testament to how competitive the high end of the market is becoming. Either way, hats off to all brand’s mentioned.

 

Who’s loved most by their customers?

The customer is always right. Retail brands strive for customer satisfaction. Interestingly, this is something even Google picks up on, it’s why we source customer reviews and create a ranking accounting for average review score/ volume of reviews. This gives us a snapshot of who the most trusted brands are in the space. These are:

  1. gear4music.com
  2. gak.co.uk
  3. juno.co.uk
  4. richtonemusic.co.uk
  5. normans.co.uk
  6. pmtonline.co.uk
  7. djkit.com
  8. reidys.com
  9. guitarguitar.co.uk
  10. thediscdjstore.com

The biggest digital brand reach in the UK Music Store sector?

A believable result here: fender.com. They’ve certainly paid their dues to get where they are, along with securing their place in music history.

We look at two different metrics to access digital brand reach, these are monthly brand searches (how many times a month your brand is Googled) & overall social following.

Fender clocks in a replaceable 27,100 monthly brand searches, but it’s their social following of nearly 8 million that has them edging out the competition in this table.

Other brand’s leading in digital brand reach?

  1. guitarcenter.com
  2. reverb.com
  3. roland.com
  4. ableton.com
  5. thomann.de
  6. andertons.co.uk
  7. eastwoodguitars.com
  8. gak.co.uk
  9. djkit.com
  10. juno.co.uk

Who’s winning strictly in terms of monthly brand searches?

Some staples we all know here. Have a look at the top 5:

  1. andertons.co.uk (90,500 monthly searches)
  2. guitarguitar.co.uk (90,500/mo)
  3. gear4music.com (90,500/mo)
  4. yamaha.com (49,500/mo)
  5. reverb.com (40,500/mo)

A false king in page speed?

Leading our page speed table, we have somewhat of a false king in bassdirect.co.uk with load time scores of 99/100 across both desktop & mobile. The site very much so comes from the place of first-generation internet. Very basic & not much to load. You don’t often see sites like this anymore that are still functional.

In 2nd place, you have eastwoodguitars.com, a much more modern site, with legitimately impressive speed. We invite you to check the site out and see the difference compared to your own site. It’s actually impressive to see, they’ll be in a great position for future growth because of this.

What do I do here?

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  2. Receive the report to your given email (check spam)
  3. Read the good news and level up your decision making
  4. Find it so useful you call us for a consultation

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