A Brief History of Starland Music

ABOUT STARLAND MUSIC LTD

Building on our strong base of experience in the music business, we now have a new way to provide the best personal advice to our customers, together with a great new v3 website. Here’s a brief history of the past 30 years!

1989 - 1999

There were two different historical roots to the current Starland website. The first can be traced to a chain of ground-breaking music shops in the 1970’s and 1980’s called City Music, and three of the existing Starland team trace their first employment back to this source. The second was a business founded in Spalding, Lincs which specialised in working with music teachers in the same period, and this traded as Keyboards in Action. They were merged together in 1989, and all the educational business and Mail Order business were combined under the management of current owner, Nick Kilby, and operated for almost 10 years from small warehouse premises in Plympton, Devon.

In 1983, the year of the launch of the remarkable DX7 synth and the Clavinova digital piano range, Keyboards in Action was recognised by Yamaha as its first education specialist retailer. By 1995, as we were no longer limited to keyboard instruments, the trading name was changed from Keyboards in Action to Starland Music, and over a half of the team were involved in our wide range of percussion, brass and woodwind and stringed instruments.

In 1997, Starland launched one of the first music retail websites (v1) in the UK, and won many awards for its informative catalogues and website descriptions. One third of the schools in the UK had opened accounts with the company, and over 1,000 education institutions today have a history of ordering equipment which goes back over 25 years.

1999 - 2009

The company opened a 13,000 sq ft Music Technology Centre in Estover, Devon in 2000, and combined its warehousing, service, showroom and offices in one location. Almost 500,000 catalogues were mailed to customers during this decade, but the extensive website (v2 !) was upgraded to work hand-in-hand with the catalogues and showroom. Despite acclaim for the high-quality showroom and workshop facilities, it became increasingly obvious that our customers were more swayed by lower prices than by top quality local service, so very regrettably the building was sold in January 2010, enabling us to improve our competitiveness across the board.

With the increasing awareness of the need to reduce wastage and paper usage, the routine of an annual catalogue production was halted in 2008 and changed to a 2-year cycle, and the use of the website vastly increased.

Our new profile for the 2010s

Rather than move to smaller premises, Starland Music had already set up a partnership arrangement the previous year with another large educational supplies company, Frederick Hyde Ltd, and had gradually moved all the stock lines and special offers from the premises in Estover to Frederick Hyde’s warehousing in Surrey. They also have a large showroom in Haslemere under their trading name Chamberlain Music. When the Starland building was sold in January 2010, this enabled Starland’s sales and technical support team to concentrate on writing and reviewing the instruments, and providing a first-class personal ordering and advice service to Music teachers and their pupils. All stock is now shipped to customers throughout the world from premises in Surrey – midway between Gatwick and Heathrow airports, and several UK carriers are used daily to ship our customers’ orders to their homes and schools.

The 2010 catalogue has been produced, and at 260 pages its twice as big as our last, and shows the tremendous advantages of combining our stock ranges with Frederick Hyde’s. It’s free to UK Music teachers upon request, and costs just £3.95 for private customers. However, if our famous “We Think” mini reviews had been included, it would have been 100 pages longer, so these are all on this website, which has been redesigned for 2010, and this is now website v3.

Partnership is definitely the way forward – we are proud of our 30-yr old partnerships with many of the most active Music Departments in the country, and there isn’t a single LEA (local education authority) in the UK without Starland customers in its area. We also assist music therapists in NHS trusts, musicians working in prisons, special schools, youth clubs and voluntary organisations. We are proud too of our 2-year old “fulfilment” arrangement with Frederick Hyde Ltd, as our combined purchasing power has enabled us to double our product range AND make our prices even more competitive. If your interest is in Music Education, you should have a Starland Music account!

We do what we do best for our customers – advice, guidance, information and tech support, and our partners at Frederick Hyde do the distribution and invoicing. We don’t make claims to be able to support professional working musicians, bands, and pro studios, because every other music shop claims to do this better. Become partners with us in 2010, and we’ll give you the personal guidance that is usually absent from the companies with the big impersonal websites. A browse through the Starland website followed by a chat on our local-rate telephone (0845 862 1913), or an email, thoughtfully answered, could guide you to the right instrument for your needs, and save you a fortune.