Shadows Fall’s Brian Fair Rebukes Trump for the Effect Tariffs Will Have on Instrument Market
Life lately has felt like we’ve all been on the receiving end of diarrhea—the Trump administration is the sick bootyhole, and we are the innocent toilet bowl just waiting for the downpour of literal shit to stop. Brian Fair, the frontman for Shadows Fall, took to Threads to talk about how the unnecessary tariffs Trump has placed on basically everything, and the damage it has and will continue to have on the music instrument market.
Along with being in Shadows Fall, Fair works for St. Louis Music, one of the largest instrument and accessory distributors in North America. His lambasting of Trump’s stupidity is more than warranted, as he explains:
“I work for a company that owns a variety of instruments brands: guitars, percussion, orchestral strings, brass, woodwinds etc. our landing costs have sky rocketed and those costs are being turned into higher prices that will be unfortunately be handed down to the consumers.
“We have tried to avoid increases where ever possible but a lot of it is unavoidable,” he continued. “Some of these brands used to be made in the US but that priced them entirely out of the market so production shifted to overseas many years ago.
“I work directly with Main St. brick and mortar music stores, some that are barely scraping by. These increases, no matter how small, will make it even more difficult for these stores to survive.
“I am by no means an expert on international trade but I am seeing the damage caused by these tariffs first hand and this is just the beginning,” Fair added. “Hope there is still a market left once the dust clears.
“Also, the idea that domestic or other manufacturers that are NOT affected by tariffs won’t raise their prices to match the market have not paid attention to history. We saw prices increased by those unaffected as soon as they were announced and as we see with inflation, once prices go up they do not come down for any reason. The market resets, everyone jumps on board to maximize profits regardless of their costs and keeps it moving.”
You don’t have to be an economist to understand how devastating these tariffs are not only to instrument sales but to everything else. Guitar brands like Fender and Martin produce many products in Mexico, while drum kit manufacturers like Yamaha and PDP make all their instruments in China. Mexico, Canada, Indonesia, and Europe are also big manufacturing and production hubs.
Since Trump started trumping all over the last little bits of goodness we had in the world, the U.S. stock market has plummeted $9.6 trillion, half of which happened in the last few days. Stocks hit their biggest one-day drop since COVID started back in 2020, so, everything is CLEARLY going so fucking well.
