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Will Warwick become the new Fender?

#62
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#67
I think Ibanez would be heartily on their way to being "the next Fender" in the bass market if anyone would be. I'm willing to bet GC sells just as many of those as they do Fenders. If you include the Squier brand, then it def surpasses Ibanez though. Most of the guitar stores I have visited in the past 10 yrs only had one, maybe two Warwicks, and it was usually a Rockbass, not the German ones. Warwick's US distribution is just too poor for me to ever see them ever become the next Fender, or even the next Ibanez. They have a following (including me) and I think it comes mainly from metalhead bassists who were into Mudvayne/Slipknot/Flaw/Incubus etc at a point in the 90's/early 2000s when those artists were repping WW heavily, and a good deal of bassists in that genre still do, but not as many as in that period it seems.
 
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#70
hrodbert696 said:
This post made me cry.



I think there's a valid point here - which is really that it's up to Fender "slipping" somehow (in a way they haven't already done), and then someone else being in position to overtake them. There tends to be a distinction between "classic" and "modern" bass tones and if something happens that makes the market tilt completely to the "modern" tone, I suppose Warwick is in as good a position as anybody to benefit. But I don't see it happening.



Ouch! Liking a Fender is equivalent to thinking it's OK to hit your wife? Exaggerate much?

I don't see any evidence whatsoever that preference for classic Fender designs is a generational thing. You look at all the 20 somethings playing in hipster/indie/pop-punk/metal/whatever bands and there are Fenders all over the place.

Really, what we're looking at here is the dynamics of a "classic." When someone produces the first really impactful piece of work in a given field, that piece of work becomes the "classic" and therefore the point of reference for everything that comes after. No matter how much the stuff that comes later improves on the original, people still feel that the original is the Original and keep going back to it as a point of reference. Many people have written plays since Shakespeare but Shakespeare will always be Shakespeare. Evolution of the tradition only reinforces the importance of the root of the tradition. Fender benefits from the same phenomenon, for better or for worse.
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Dunno what 20-somethings you know, but I've seen less fenders than anything regardless of genre played by people my age. Also nobody wants to be like hipsters either, if hipsters are the ones pushing fenders..that alone will kill fender lol. Most metal bassists I know play ibanez (usually btbs), warwick, dingwall, spectors. LTD's are also common among young metalheads, the low end ones like the forest. Most punks have MM stingrays or Yamaha rbx/Ibanez. The most popular/stocked basses here are ibanez by a long mile. The djent movement (you may need to google that one) also made all the hardcore/metal kids want fancy or custom things like Mayones and Dingwalls or headless fanned fret basses, over a generic Fender. The only person in the last year I've seen at any gig using a Fender was about 30 years old and played nothing but Fender.
 

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