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And what are you looking for? I am a composer and am interested to know

I would hope that most music teachers go to a music store.

That were I go, to a music store, as a student.

Well, if book publishers insist on charging $40 for six pieces of paper, stapled together, then music stores will simply go out of business like newspapers and print magazines.

Well... not all of us do that! :P But there's the currency conversion and shipping fees to consider (at least in the case of Editions Musica Ferrum and for a little while longer, I hope)...

To answer the OP.

sheetmusicplus

primamusic

Well, if book publishers insist on charging $40 for six pieces of paper, stapled together, then music stores will simply go out of business like newspapers and print magazines.

Well, my books that I buy are about $10 for 70 pages unless you want a cd, which I don't and it is $20 and this is in Canada. In the states it is usually half price, but the wages are lower and there are 600 millions people as opposed to Canada with 50 million and the third largest country on the planet.

For me the internet is fun, but it is not safe for business and I support my local people who work, raise a family and and pay taxes.

I try to shop locally, but we have only one store and they rarely stock anything I'm interested in. I'd like to support them, but they don't make much of an effort to encourage my business.

I would also like to shop locally, but like Minniemay, the local store doesn't really stock everything I like. That's not the biggest issue, however. They aren't very well organized, and if I'm looking for something and have to ask for help the person who helps find the music is very slow and likes to talk a lot. The problem is, when she talks she stops what she is doing, so a 15 minute run to the store ends up being 45 minutes. Ain't no one got time fo dat!

This. My local shop suffered from terribly slow ordering, to the point where I just gave up sending my students there, and told them to shop on Amazon instead, because, well.. we could do with starting on this piece within a week or two, not next term some time!

Then they got taken over by someone who thought that signing it over to a very large music distributor would be a good idea. Now they feel like practically every other sheet music in the UK, with the exact same selection of the most popular music. They used to stock (and sell) my books, too - last time I went there, I had to crawl around on the floor to find them in some obscure corner, because they're not in MIPs list of titles to put in the main display.

Last time my colleague went in, the owners were moaning about how sales have dropped significantly - I wonder why.

Slow fulfillment of orders is the problem I have at my local store, too. I'd very much like to support them, but when it can take months for music that I have ordered to come in, I start having serious second thoughts.

The major problem seems to be with the distributor(s) the local store uses. I don't know why the distributors are so incredibly slow. It generally seems to be a problem when items are out of stock at the distributor. I can find the music I want in stock at sheetmusicplus or Amazon, and whisk, it comes to me almost immediately.

The distributors are implicitly in competition with the online retailers because if the music stores all go under, the distributor loses its customers. So I don't understand why they can't gear up and be as well-stocked for their client music stores as the internet retailers are.

Yes -- AND -- if musicians from all corners of the art were not busy finding ways to by-pass copyright regulations, then the legitimate music publishers would not need exorbitant prices to make any profit.

Newspapers and magazines? You are a smart man. Have you actually done any reading on these "new alternatives" to printed (and edited) media? What are we becoming?!?

I stopped years ago going to my local music store. I get a rebate check and better discounts when I shop online.

I know Minnie, and Morodiene, and Ben, and PianoStudent88,

It can be a sad state of "service", AND it is certainly part of a downward spiral, to which we are adding momentum. In the profession, one needs to use effective resources that work, and in a timely fashon. But here's what LoPresti worries about:

I can buy virtually everything cheaper at the WalStore SuperCenter than I can at Smith’s General Store, or at Wilson’s Pharmacy. WalStore is well-lighted, fully-stocked, and I can shop at 2:00 AM if I so choose. It has plenty of free parking and more than two cash registers!

Step 1: Smith’s looses profitability, and can no longer afford to pay the highly experienced staff that has assisted its customers for years.
Wilson’s looses profitability, and can no longer afford to pay the highly experienced individuals that have assisted its customers for years.
Step 2: Former employees from Smith’s move out of the area.
Step 3: Bill and Betty, former employees from Wilson’s, find work at WalStore.
Step 4: Service at both Smith’s and Wilson’s deteriorates. More customers abandon ship.
Step 5: Smith’s General Store, and Wilson’s Pharmacy no longer need to order as much product, and their distributors begin to neglect them.
Step 6: Smith’s General Store goes out of business.
Wilson’s Pharmacy closes its doors.

Time passes . . . . .

Step 7: Someone at WalStore Corporate Headquarters notices that SuperCenter Store # 7692 is no longer meeting “profitability metrics”, plus the high cost of delivering up there is well above corporate guidelines!
Step 8: Can anyone guess what comes next? Bill and Betty better dust off their resumes!
Step 9: The area no longer has a General Store, nor a Pharmacy, nor a SuperCenter. PROGRESS!

There's more than that going on, Ed. First you have the monstrous head of Profit-At-All-Costs, or PAAC for short, plus its brother Making A Buck = MAB. Maybe it's a sister, hard to tell. So a PAAC owns a strip mall and charges outrageous rent for the premises. Another PAAC hires the cheapest staff possible, people who don't know what they are doing. If they do have a senior, knowledgeable staff member, find a way to make him redundant because he's more expensive than some kid. MAB smells money and opens a store - real or virtual - with flashy and/or impressive looking things that draws the crowds. All of that stuff works together.

We have a store downtown that is in the right part of the neighbourhood. It's near a university and the National Arts Center, where we find the likes of Pinchas Zuckerman, orchestra members, students working toward these things. The neighbourhood itself is also unusual. You find the artists, the ex-hippies, the educated or self-educated people who love substance rather than flash. In that store the staff consists of what seems to be young musicians and music students near the graduate level. Teachers go there, and students go there. Regardless of what program you are studying under, RCM, Suzuki, other, the staff makes an instant bee-line to the material and can advise you on what teachers are preferring at this time, and why. I don't think this store could survive in any other location.

I don't have a car presently so I can't get to that store. But my work occasionally takes me to a mall where there is a music store that advertises popular things in its window, has lots of orange and yellow, and surprisingly it has some good material in it. The orange-yellow happy thing brings in regular customers who are not musicians, while the musicians know it has what they want. The staff there are musicians too, including with music degrees. But you have to explain things to them about editions, because their customers are looking for "easy" things, not for correct things.

Food for thought, Ed. There's a mall right next door. Three places are vacant and "for rent". It is a fact that the mall is charging a ridiculously high rent, so big chains like Shoppers and A&P aka Superfresh aka whatever Quebec chain bought it, can afford to stay there. They can even afford to take a loss on any store. Several excellent small stores with MANY customers, have had to close. This has nothing to do with customer loyalty.

This can happen. But there's another side to it as well, one which I had no appreciation for until my wife started working at W**mart.

Bill and Betty have resumes. Most of the W-store employees do not. The profitability of the large store allows it to employ huge numbers of relatively unskilled people who have little chance of finding a job elsewhere. These numbers are many times larger than what the General Store and Pharmacy could support. They aren't paid a lot - but they are not doing crime or on welfare either.

Progress? I dunno. I see it both ways.

More on the subject.

The big businesses hire experts who tell them how to market, and what to market. The decision makers listening to the experts and following their studies are in an office away from the actual stores. The store owners hear what their customers have to say, but are unable to respond to it. Whatever sales happen are interpreted according to the theories and experts, and not according to customer action. This material comes across my desk in my work.

Here is a very concrete example - though it's not music you may get the drift. There is a gas chain that started piping in loud, frantic music at the gas pumps. I literally could not bear it, put in a minimum amount of gasoline, and went in to pay. I told the staff that this loud music had caused me to buy less gas than I would have, and that it was so unpleasant that I'd go to another station in the future if this continued. Staff told me that MANY customers had complained saying the same thing. But head office imposed this loud music, so they could not heed customer feedback.

Their reasoning: The music came from their own radio station and contained messages advertising their products (the explanation I got). So some "expert" cooked this up, probably through some studies. The fact that when you drive away customers from buying their primary product - gasoline - through this tactic, and a customer who goes elsewhere and won't buy any product, just isn't there for them. Meanwhile the actual staff dealing with customers has no input. What you and I do doesn't matter, because the experts deal with fictitious customers, and statistics that are collected and interpreted various ways. Or "demographics" that hypothesizes. Etc.

Addendum: TimR's observations seem to go with what I wrote in my first post.

Back on the topic - I haven't seen "what do teachers look for" answered. I'd imagine that this goes into things like music matching the abilities of students at certain levels, that will also help them to learn. Does this require some teaching knowledge as well as composition skills to pull off? I imagine that music for the lower grades would be the most challenging of all.