Closing out our series of year-end sales retrospectives, we're going to take a good hard look at the Reverb vintage guitar and bass market in 2016. Unlike our previous installments where we've focused on sales for individual pedal, amp, and synth models, today we're going to examine the market on a broad brand basis.

Here's how we're going to approach this enormous subject:

Below you'll find charts for the top 25 vintage brands sorted by total number of 2016 sales on Reverb divided into separate sections for electric guitars, acoustic guitars, and bass guitars.

Think of this as an index of the market for these instruments categories.

Within each section you'll see the average order amount per sale by dollar, as well as stats for how much of the Reverb vintage market for each category the brand claims. For reference, we've also included the same numbers from 2015 to show relative increases and decreases in market prices over a two year span.

Below this main index, you'll see data for the most popular individual brands by decade. These smaller charts rank the most popular makes with the average price paid for instruments made in the given year span. The intent here is to illustrate the most popular brands from each period which should reflect both the volume of guitars produced at that time as well as their popularity with modern players and collectors.

A few notes on methodology:

• The data below is taken directly from Reverb's internal database and is limited to sales on our site. While this should be a fairly consistent reflection of the general vintage market, it may differ based on the buying habits and tastes of our specific user-base.

• For our purposes today, we're defining vintage as any instrument made before 1985. There's an age-old debate about what truly defines "vintage" in a guitar context, but we'll save that for another post.

• The numbers below do not control for various price outliers. The occasional $200k '59 Les Paul Standard sale, for instance, is averaged with beat-up guitars full of unoriginal parts and broken headstocks. Undoubtedly, this method impacts the dollar averages for each brand. This is especially prevalent for brands lower on the list with a lower total number of transactions. Our assumption is that these outliers will average out on a relative basis between different brands.

• When examining the changes in average price from 2015 to 2016, keep in mind that the exact composition of the sales dictating these numbers may have shifted, so the change may not always indicate an overall price change as it does a change in the types of guitars that are selling.

Alright, now that we've gotten the technical details out of the way, it's time to dive into the numbers. There's a lot of info presented here, and while I'll offer a few of my own observations along the way, the main goal with a data dump of this size is to give everyone the opportunity to explore the numbers and glean some insights of their own. Let us know what you come up with in the comments.

Top 10 Electric Brands by Average Sale Value of Decade of Item

Takeaways

• Overall, most major brands gained some ground on pricing, with many second-tier brands like Greco and Silvertone falling in value.

• Somewhat surprisingly, Gibson topped Fender as the overall best-selling vintage electric guitar brand. There are many possible explanations for this. For one, Gibson has historically offered a wider range of guitar types than Fender with more hollow bodies and even lower-end models like the Melody Maker. And – while I have no specific data to back this up – anecdotally, it seems that there are more devoted Gibson-only collectors who buy multiple guitars in a year.

• Vintage Airlines dropped in value this year. Part of this could be due to less interest in Jack White, whose use of Airlines drove prices up a number of years back. Additionally, Eastwood's reissues of these distinct red instruments may be attracting buyers who would have otherwise gone with an original.

• While not listed here due to comparatively low overall sales volume, Wandre, Alembic, and Travis Bean rank as the highest-priced vintage guitar brands due to a lack of any lower-end models to bring down the average (this excludes a few custom brands where only one or two guitars sold over the year). The average Wandre sale in 2016 was $6,170.

• The inclusion of Peavey on the list is entirely due to defining the upper range of "vintage" as 1985. Affordable Peavey T-series guitars from the late '70s and early '80s have been extremely popular on Reverb the past few years.

Top 10 Acoustic Brands by Average Sale Value of Decade of Item

Takeaways

• Vintage Gibson acoustics outsold Martins, though they still carry a noticeably lower average price-tag. Chalk this up to the many lower-end Gibson acoustic models – like the B-15 and F-25 – as well as a whole crop of '70s Gibson acoustics that collectors roundly dismiss. Comparatively, vintage Martin guitars all score relatively high marks on the price and quality scale with even the hit-or-miss '70s models selling for prices similar to modern used equivalents.

• Epiphone acoustic climbed a bit this year both in terms of price and popularity. It's possible that more players have learned that '60s Epiphones — which were built in Gibson's Kalamazoo factory — are essentially the same as many corollary Gibson models.

• Harmony and Silvertone both increased in price on the acoustic chart this year, though decreased on the electric guitar index. It could be that the popularity of their electric instruments has already peaked, yet still has some room to grow for acoustic players.

Top 10 Bass Brands by Average Sale Value of Decade of Item

Takeaways

• Overall, vintage bass brands gained more ground on an average price basis than acoustic or electric guitar brands this year.

• As always, Fender dominated the vintage guitar market this year. As you can see in the decade charts, this dominance is mostly due to the continued popularity of Fender basses from the '60s.

• Music Man ranked relatively low on the list given the StingRay's absolutely iconic status. Music Man didn't ship any basses until 1976, which gives the brand a limited vintage window relative to Rickenbacker and Fender.

• Note: we did not include a price chart for the 1950s for basses as the sales volume is very low. Suffice to say that a majority of '50s basses sold on Reverb were Fenders.

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Top Vintage Guitar Brand Prices Over Time

For the final graph of this post, we're looking at the combined average prices for nine of the top brands across combined bass, electric, and acoustic categories. This graph shows the average price by brand for instruments produced between 1950 and 1985 in five year increments.

Takeaways

• Prices on eight of the nine brands on the list decreased for guitars made in the early '70s compared to the late '60s. This period is considered a low point of American guitar production, as brands began cutting more corners to contend with increased international competition. The only charted brand to gain pricing ground in this period is Ibanez, which is a Japanese maker.

• Average Gibson prices for 2016 sales on Reverb actually went up for early '60s instruments compared to those from the late '50s. Of course, the highest-end late '50s Gibsons are worth far more than their '60s counterparts, yet these instruments sell so infrequently that they do not impact the average as much.

Final Thoughts

Overall, the vintage guitar market stayed much the same between 2015 and 2016 with prices increasing slightly. Average prices for vintage basses rose more than electric and acoustic, but only by a small margin.

This continued status quo has been the story of the vintage market for the past several years following a major dive and correction in the aftermath the 2008 financial crisis. It's a trend that follows many collectible markets.

While plenty of fads come and go, vintage instruments are ultimately luxury goods, and larger economic forces dictate prices and velocity more than any internal whims of interest or popularity. Additionally, trends like bright red Airlines or Japanese lawsuit guitars are usually too niche to displace the major players like Fender and Gibson. That said, any major longer term changes will be the result of larger demographic and economic shifts rather than collector taste.

Will the baby boomers who made the vintage market in the '90s continue to prop up demand for Fender, Gibson and Rickenbacker? Will a new generation of players with potentially softened purchasing power be able to maintain prices on blue chip guitars as the old guard leaves the scene? Will an even younger generation of musicians care about vintage guitars at all?

It's tough to predict. But as long as Reverb is part of it, we'll be here to take stock and publish our observations.

There is, of course, much more to write and analyze than we have space for above, but I'll be keeping an eye on the comments of this article and will try to answer any questions that come up.

Thanks for reading and thanks to all of our users for another awesome year for vintage guitar buying and selling on Reverb.

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