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How many electric basses exist in the world?

#81
kbob said:
The US is about 10% of the world
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Wow. No, way less than 5%. China however is pushing 20%. India catching up fast. EU population is more than double US. South America has a bigger percentage than the US. How does that make you feel?

I'd like to know if there are more bass guitars than charangos :)
 
#82
kbob said:
This is an awful lot like the "How many piano tuners in Boston?" question.

So I'll make up some numbers. Let's say that 1 in 20 US teenagers want to make music. 350 million teenagers and former teenagers (including the deceased born after 1940), 17 million musicians.

Let's say that 1 in 20 musicians want to play the bass at some point. 900,000 wannabe bass players.

Let's say that 1 in 20 bass players stick with it. 50,000 actual bass players.

Let's say that actual bass players collect an average of 5 basses. 250,000 basses.

So, in the US alone, that's 850,000 (wannabes) + 250,000 (collectors) = 1,100,000 basses in the US.

The US is about 10% of the world, so 10 million basses in the world.

Every one of those figures is wrong, but I'll stand by the final result. There are 10 million basses in the world, ±100%.
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So ..how many piano tuners are in Boston? And out of that number, how many are wicked smaht?
 
#85
JimmyM said:
I know we'll never get an accurate count after 70 years of shoddy record keeping, but I currently own 10 and have been through about 20, and compared to many of you I have a small collection. So I'm guessing that the number is at least 4 figures.
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There are as many basses in the world as there are human habitable planets in the known Universe. 1 trillion. Give or take 500 billion.
 
#88
jd56hawk said:
Definitely four figures...probably at least 3,000!
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There are almost 3,000 Wishbasses out there!
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#94
ficelles said:
South America has a bigger percentage than the US. How does that make you feel?
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Well, my father was from Argentina, so I am good with that. :thumbsup:

BassNugget said:
So ..how many piano tuners are in Boston?
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How many still-working piano tuners are in Boston?

boombloom said:
There are almost 3,000 Wishbasses out there!
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Banish the thought!!! :D

Jaygetsreal said:
What if we all hit a low E at the same moment?!
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We could probably get the Earth's axis back in proper alignment to avoid it from slowly heading towards the Sun (as we must be, given this whole global warming thing :smug:).

 
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#96
That's actually an interesting question, but not because there is an answer - more because it can't be answered accurately. There are people on this site who were alive when there were zero bass guitars on the planet, and since that time (early 50s) the bass has become such a ubiquitous, common (and I would say necessary) instrument that the number went from zero to uncountable in the course of some people's living memory. The same is true for home computers, cell phones, automotive airbags, and face tattoos, which we all now take for granted. That's pretty amazing to me that an instrument can have so profound an effect on music that it's pretty much everywhere.
 

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