The store’s new state-of-the-art !5,000-square-foot showroom.
“Some piano dealers can have an exclu- sive, almost snooty, side to them, where you feel like you have to qualify to do busi- ness with them,” Galassini explained. “Our business model is to be very inclusive. We really, truly want everyone to have the same kind of wonderful experience with music that both Tim and I had growing up. It’s the inclusiveness we loved, and we really want to help everyone, no matter who they are, play music and feel welcome.” Oliver added that Cunningham also puts a strong emphasis on growing to- day’s musicians. “We’re trying to help the 21st-century musician,” he said. “We’re trying to foster what’s relevant today. We’re not trying to help people be 19th-century musicians. That’s already happened. We want to fos- ter creativity and musicality in the next generation, and that takes a whole different tool and a whole different set of skills to be able to do.” Oliver said his team leans into the tech- nology embedded in today’s acoustics to achieve that. “Technology is a really big part of the next generation’s approach, right? The ability to record yourself and play back, to play a piano and end up with your musi- cal composition on a USB stick, to play an acoustic piano silently at night, that’s all important to our sales approach,” Oliver said. “To be able to sit down and interface with the piano to make an arrangement, and then to be able to turn your four-part chorale into a string quartet with a few
clicks of a button is amazing. It reminds me: A couple of years ago at a NAMM show, I went to one of the education sessions where they were discussing AI, and the speaker said something that really stuck with me. He said, ‘You really don’t know what a new technological thing can offer until you try to use it the wrong way.’ So, I guess what we’re trying to do is create a piano lab — a way for us to show that we offer all these new tools and make sure we’re not stuck on offering players the same way to play pianos that they have had for the last thousand years.” Galassini added the Cunningham team — which spans some 20 employees across all three locations — focuses on the best way each individual customer can use technology. “It’s fun when you’re showing families different instruments, and you’re looking at it from their point of view,” Galassini said. “You realize something that you didn’t before, like, ‘Oh, you can use it that way. That’s cool.’” The State of the Piano Market Once thought of as an aspirational symbol for middle-and-upper-class homes, acoustic piano sales have struggled in recent years. According to NAMM’s 2026 Industry Insights report, 2025 shipments were down 3.1% to 16,755 units, and unit volumes in 2025 were half of what they were a decade ago. However, Oliver and Galassini said they don’t think interest in playing or purchas- ing a piano has declined — rather, the type
of customers buying pianos has changed. “In our own experience, before we were a Yamaha dealer, we were only in one loca- tion in a section of Philadelphia and we mostly sold acoustic pianos. I would say 90%, maybe even more of our sales, were acoustic pianos,” Galassini explained. “Then, when we took on Yamaha and moved out to a much more relevant re- tail destination, it really became half and half. Now, half of the pianos we sell are Clavinovas, hybrids or some sort of digital piano without strings, and the other half do have strings. So, when people talk about the drop in the piano sales market, what I wonder is whether people are buying fewer pianos, or whether they’re just buying dif- ferent pianos.” Galassini said he believes the compla- cency of piano dealers has had a part in the sales downturn. “Anybody can sit and wait for the door of their piano showroom to open, and I really feel like there’s been a lot of that,” he said. “I’m hopeful that our new loca- tion is going to be something that inspires people and gets them interested in want- ing to try to learn to play. That’s really it. Our relationship with Yamaha, now 10 years old, runs deep and I really resonate with a lot of the things they put forward. In their customer philosophy, they say that it’s irresponsible to sell somebody an instrument without offering them the opportunity to learn how to play it. And that’s what we are hoping to do with our new dealership.” MI
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