Guitar Lessons Statistics: Popularity, Age Trends & Outcomes

By ABC Academy of Music teaching team · Updated August 2026

Are you thinking about starting guitar lessons? Or wondering why the guitar in the closet never quite took hold? The data tells a clear story. Millions of people pick up a guitar every year. It beats almost every other instrument for beginner interest. But guitar also has one of the roughest survival rates around. Most people who start never make it to year two. This page is part of our full Music Education Research hub, alongside our broader music education statistics. It pulls together real enrollment, age, and retention data for guitar.

How Many People Are Actually Learning Guitar Right Now

A large 2021 US survey covered over 10,000 people. It found that 7 percent of Americans ages 13 to 64, about 16 million people, had started learning guitar in the past two years. That’s a striking number for one instrument. 62 percent of these new players said COVID-19 lockdowns were a big reason they picked it up. That matches what many teaching studios saw firsthand. People with sudden free time reached for something they’d always meant to learn.

The same survey found that 53 percent of beginners practice two hours or less per week. But most people believed it takes about four hours a week, for one to two years, to “get good.” That gap between goals and real practice time explains a lot of what follows.

Who Starts Guitar, and at What Age

Guitar skews young, but not as young as you might expect. In the same 2021 US Fender study, 72 percent of new guitar players were between 13 and 34 years old. That’s a wide band. It covers early teens picking up their first guitar and adults in their late twenties starting from scratch.

Gender is closer to even than the old stereotype suggests. Fender’s 2018 research report, covering the US and UK, found that women made up 50 percent of beginner and aspiring guitar players. The same report found that 72 percent of new players started guitar “to gain a life skill or as a means of self-betterment.” 61 percent wanted to learn songs to play alone or with friends.

For younger children, the UK’s ABRSM “Making Music” report is useful. It’s a 2014 survey of 1,726 children ages 5 to 17. It found the average starting age for any instrument was 7.6 years old. Kids who later stopped playing had typically done so by age 11.1. Guitar needs more finger strength and hand span than piano or recorder. So it tends to start a little later in most teaching studios. That’s part of why ABC Academy opens private guitar lessons at age 5 and up, not in early childhood.

Acoustic or Electric: What Beginners Are Actually Playing

Kids lean acoustic first, and guitar sales are strong across the board. Here’s what the data shows:

Electric guitar still pulls its own weight — that pedal spending is a sign electric players keep going well past year one. Deciding between the two for a first guitar? Our Acoustic Guitar and Electric Guitar pages cover what each one involves at ABC Academy, including typical starting ages and gear.

Where Guitar Ranks Against Other Instruments

Guitar is popular, but it isn’t the single most-played instrument among UK children. Part of the reason is access: keyboard and recorder are cheap and common in school classrooms, while guitar is more often a family or private-lesson choice. Our own piano lessons statistics page digs into piano’s numbers.

Guitar stands out in how it’s learned. It’s one of the instruments people most often teach themselves first, before ever sitting down with a teacher:

Why Most Beginners Quit — and What Changes That

Here’s the number that should give any beginner pause. About 45 percent of new guitars sold each year go to first-time players. Of those new players, roughly 90 percent quit within their first year, according to a top US guitar maker’s own CEO. He called it an industry-wide retention problem, not an interest problem. People keep buying guitars. They just don’t keep playing them.

A 2021 US study backs this up. 25 percent of new players said they had stalled, not improving despite still owning the instrument. Add that to the earlier practice-time finding, just two hours a week or less for over half of beginners, and a pattern emerges. Guitar is easy to start and hard to keep up without structure.

One factor matters here: how people learn in the first place. Beginners rank online video tutorials as the most helpful way to learn guitar, ahead of private lessons. That doesn’t mean lessons don’t work. It means most beginners try to teach themselves first, often without the feedback that catches bad habits early. A weekly lesson with a teacher who fixes technique in real time closes exactly that gap.

Guitar Lessons at ABC Academy

At ABC Academy of Music, guitar is part of our Private Lessons program. It’s open to students age 5 and up, alongside piano, voice, drums, and ukulele. Is your child younger? Our Rhythm Kids classes (ages 4 to 7) build the rhythm and listening skills that make picking up an instrument easier later. Our Music Together® program (ages 0 to 3) does the same groundwork even earlier, and it runs at all four of our locations. Music Together is a registered trademark of Music Together LLC. ABC Academy of Music is an authorized Music Together center.

Private guitar lessons run at our Lawrence Park and St. Clair West (Oakwood/Conway) studios in Toronto. We also teach Music Together® and Rhythm Kids at our Dufferin Grove and Brampton locations. Browse our full classes lineup, check current rates and payment options, or contact us to set up a first lesson. So many beginners stall out without structure. A regular weekly lesson with feedback is one of the best ways to keep playing past year one.