The Artist Endorsement
August 24th, 2009
The sound of a Steinway speaks its own praise. Nevertheless, the pages of Steinway history are filled with heartfelt endorsements by concert pianists. For those of us who sell the Steinway piano, their testimony offers a goldmine of sales power.
The success a concert pianist can hope to achieve depends partly on the quality of their performance piano. The artist needs talent, inspiration, and an instrument that responds to his or her creative senses and is fully reliable.
The concert stage is thus the bottom line for the quality of an instrument. Most piano manufacturers make aggressively positive claims about their pianos’ performance potential, yet few of their instruments are found on the concert stage. The Steinway, on the other hand, is the instrument chosen for nine out of ten public performances.
This may not seem extraordinary until you consider the following factors:
1. None of the 1,500 + Steinway Artists living today has ever been paid to endorse a Steinway piano.
2. Steinway artists own Steinway pianos, having selected their personal Steinway before becoming a Steinway artist. Many Steinway artists own several Steinway pianos of various models.
What do Steinway artists receive for contributing their names to the Steinway artist roster? Our commitment to provide them with the finest pianos in the world for performance, recording, and rehearsal use are artists discriminating in their choice of piano.
Not only artists are discriminating with the choice of piano. Most major performance venues throughout the world own or make almost exclusive use of a Steinway concert grand for major piano performances.
Among the distinguished international piano competitions, year after year the statistics confirm the preeminence of the Steinway. Among final contestants, the vast majority nearly always choose to perform on a Steinway. In short, when demanding musicians at the highest level select a piano, more than 98% of the time it will be a Steinway.
It is important to realize that over 98% of all concert pianists are performing on newer Steinway grand pianos. There is a myth that the older Steinway’s are better than the newer Steinway’s. This is obviously not the case. The newer Steinway pianos are the ones performed on by concert pianists. They do not perform on older Steinway pianos. As an example the Concert Bank of Pianos, which is made up of over 300 pianos, have an average age of less than 5 years.
The best endorsement is from those who truly know.