Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work · Nick Petrella and Andy Heise

#358: Jack DiIanni (Musician & Owner of Volkwein's Music) (pt. 2 of 2)

·38 min·2 clips

John Philip Sousa IV looked at Jack and said, "Hi, Gus. You're the new Gus."

1. Part 2 of Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work episode #358 covers how Volkwein's Music, founded in 1888, has adapted across decades of change in the music products industry. 2. Hosts Andy Heiss and Nick Petrella interview Jack DiIanni, a percussionist with a 50-year portfolio career who joined Volkwein's management in 1981 and became owner in 2017. 3. Jack's central point is that the biggest shifts were electronic: paper music sales faded and websites now ship specialty items like marimba mallets out of state. 4. He says the store once "looked like a library," and recalls his wife's father, a truck driver, walking in and thinking he was in the wrong place. 5. On operations, he explains that Matthew (president) and Christine now do the hiring and inventory, while repair technicians, two of them close to 80 years old, serve clients including Pittsburgh Symphony players. 6. On inventory, he describes selling slow items like a three-year-old purchase at a lower price without reordering, and stocking enough rental instruments for students, though the rest is "a little bit of a guess." 7. He recounts performance highlights: a Boston Symphony cellist told him at the Pittsburgh Ballet, "you're the only one that sounds like Vic Firth," and conductor John Hoebel's praise convinced him to stay in Pittsburgh rather than move to California. 8. He describes 15 years in the Virginia Grand Military Band under Loris, where Sousa's great-grandson John Philip Sousa IV called him "Gus," after Sousa's original bass drummer, and where Sousa family materials went to the Library of Congress. 9. He cites Sousa's 1913 comment that "technology will wipe out live music," notes Sousa refused to record his band, and says high school bands have dropped from about 170 members to the 80-piece band of his own school days. 10. Suited to music retailers, percussionists, and anyone considering buying a legacy business.

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