Guitar Center plots its turnaround, with a focus on serving ‘serious musicians’

Experiential Marketing // July 20, 2026 Guitar Center plots its turnaround, with a focus on serving ‘serious musicians’ By Julia Waldow Guitar Center Nearly six years after it declared bankruptcy, Guitar Center says its turnaround efforts are striking a chord.

A privately held company, Guitar Center just marked its ninth quarter of positive growth, CEO Gabe Dalporto told Modern Retail. Guitar Center’s most recent quarterly sales are up 5. 2% to total $635 million, per Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, time spent in the brand’s 300 stores is up 16% year over year, while store traffic is up for the first time in more than a decade, Dalporto said. The company also expects to see about $16 million in tariff refunds. It’s been a long road toward recovery for Guitar Center.

The company, which is based in California, started in 1959 and catered to famous clientele including Eddie Van Halen. In 2007, it was acquired by private equity company Bain Capital for $1. 9 billion — a move that saddled the instrument seller with approximately $1. 6 billion in debt. In 2014, Ares Management Corp.

took controlling ownership of Guitar Center, therefore reducing its debt, but also failing to fully kickstart growth. Then, Guitar Center filed for bankruptcy in 2020 amid the pandemic. It exited bankruptcy under Ares, Brigade Capital Management and Carlyle Group.

Today, Guitar Center is still chipping away at millions of dollars in debt, and it’s fending off competition from digital-first players. “I’ll be the first to say there’s still a ton of work to do,” Dalporto told Modern Retail in an interview.

But Guitar Center is also reaping the rewards of several changes it has made on the marketing and merchandising sides, Dalporto said. These include returning to Guitar Center’s core customer (the hardcore musician), as well as holding more events in stores and using AI for everything from recommending products to scheduling guitar lessons.

While Guitar Center caters to beginners, its most avid customers are “serious musicians,” Dalporto said. They don’t necessarily need to be playing gigs, but they do tend to view music as “a big part of their identity,” he explained. “It could be a kid who’s just picked up an instrument and is playing a couple of hours a day.

It could be a major touring artist who’s going across the country. It could be someone who has just enjoyed playing music their whole life.” Dalporto said he understands this well, being a musician himself. “I am the target customer,” he said, gesturing to his office lined with guitars.

He’s also not a retail insider, having come to Guitar Center from Lending Tree and the online education platform Udacity. But he believes his passion for music gives him a window into what musicians expect. Today, Guitar Center is becoming “an experiential environment, with knowledgeable people and great products,” he said. “That’s worked incredibly well.”

“Everybody told me retail was hard,” Dalporto added. “And it’s a lot of work and a lot of discipline. [But] it’s not hard. It’s just like, ‘Talk to your customer and give them what they want.'” Fine-tuning Guitar Center Dalporto joined Guitar Center in 2018 as a member of the company’s board of directors.

He then became CEO in 2023, after Guitar Center continued to see sales falter. When announcing Dalporto’s leadership, Guitar Center said he had “deep expertise” in “digital transformation, customer acquisition and maintaining a best-in-class customer experience.”

While Guitar Center had emerged from bankruptcy a few years earlier, the move “didn’t fix the underlying problems,” Dalporto said. “We made a lot of decisions that, maybe, in isolation made sense — cut a little cost here, cut a little cost there — [but] in aggregate, really pissed off our customers.”

Dalporto, a longtime guitar player, set out to hear from shoppers in his first weeks on the job. Many voiced frustrations with the company’s selection. Most of Guitar Center’s customers are dedicated musicians, but about 70% of the merchandise consisted of lower-end products.

What’s more, Guitar Center had scaled back on employee training after conducting a series of cuts. Customers wanted advice from store associates, but the company “had taken away the knowledgeable salesperson,” Dalporto said. Products also weren’t accessible; instruments were often locked up or located on high shelves.

If a customer wanted to try a guitar, they had to wave over a store worker, who often needed a ladder to retrieve items. “If you’re trying guitars, you’re going to try 10 or 15 of them before you find the one you like,&#8