How to be controversial in the Hang Drum world?

When I started playing hang drum, I was mesmerized (like many) by the simplicity of this new instrument, which was invented 70 years ago somewhere in the Caribbean. I knew instantly I needed to have one… so what does a 21st century schizoid man in need do — opens a browser window and starts googling: ”buy hang drum”.

In the early phase of my reasearch I learned that the hang drum was in fact a minor Swiss design tweak made to the Jamaican steelpans, but it didn’t matter. The tweak was enough to spark my interest in the instrument, which I knew only from the annoyingly happy music that is often played with it (and the crappy and useless synth presets, that nobody actually uses, but which are easy to program because of the simple mathematic relation between the oscillations).

Anyway, besides my taste for good music, a decade later the hang drum has discreetly revolutionized the musical instrument business in the 21st century with the clever use of internet and scarcity principle.

In 2017 every second high school dropout hippie either wants a hang drum or is thinking about wanting one. Yet in reality the instrument is still almost impossible to find. Most of the hang drum sales happen on the black market and only a few instruments end up in traditional music instrument stores. Usually getting your product in the stores has been a good thing for small businesses, but somehow this unorthodox business avoiding strategy has worked in favor of hang drum manufacturers. Some builders tend to express anticapitalist attitudes, but in truth they are promoting anarcho-capitalism, where everyone prices their goods however they like (and pay no taxes).

When it comes to hang drums, there seems to be a paradox in the law of supply and demand. Five years ago the number of hang drum builders could be counted with two hand fingers. Today nobody knows anymore how many builders there are, but the number is probably 178. This means that the supply of hang drums has spiked with at least tenfold increase in production. Yet, somehow this has failed to lower the prices — in fact, the median price of a sold instrument has gone up with at least 1500 dollars in 15 years!

P.s. There is also another hungry economy lurking beneath the hang drum industry: legal advocacies who specialize in the patent law. In case you represent an advocacy of this sorts and your client sent you to read this blog post, then you should understand that this text is satire. And you should probably quit doing what you are doing, because your work is harming a vibrant community of instrument builders and musicians. Why not use your education to fight the nazis instead?

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