The bass guitar as an instrument, an industry and a recorded sound.
Section 05
Reverb data, Guitar Center's Chapter 11, the Made-in-Mexico and Made-in-Japan distinction, and what CITES did to a rosewood fingerboard.
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Reverb's sold-listings data has become the effective price index for bass guitars — more current and more granular than any dealer catalogue — and it shows patterns that the retail price lists do not: which Fender lines depreciate fastest, where the Japanese instruments hold value, and what a Sadowsky actually trades for. Covers the data as of the most recent available period, with that date stated in the text.
Guitar Center's bankruptcy filing in November 2020 and its emergence a month later restructured nearly one billion dollars in debt — and the store count and purchasing power changed with it.
Fender's Player, Vintera and American Professional lines — plus the Custom Shop above them — cover a span from the Ensenada factory to a California workshop, and the question of what that price difference buys is not straightforward.
All Dalbergia species were listed under CITES Appendix II in 2017, requiring export documentation for any instrument with a rosewood fingerboard — until finished instruments were partially exempted again in 2019.
Most bass guitars sold in the United States below the premium bracket are manufactured in Mexico, Indonesia or China — which makes the instrument market directly exposed to trade-policy shifts in a way that domestic furniture or apparel is not.