Case Study: Pandemic drives shift to online music lessons

by | Sep 12, 2020

Online music student

The government-mandated quarantine in mid-2020 was a serious blow to businesses that rely upon in-person contact, such as Silver Music Studios, a music school in Havertown, Pennsylvania that had operated continuously for twenty-five years. Almost overnight, the in-person teaching model that had served musicians for hundreds of years was, for the sake of public safety, prohibited.

Silver Music Studios partnered with Airdrie Media to promote their online music lessons and online payments, creating a completely touchless experience. For the lessons themselves, accounts and instruction sets were created for Facetime and Skype, as well as for a new videoconferencing solution called “Zoom”. For payments, the first electronic payment system supported was PayPal, selected because of its name recognition and the seamlessly way it supported credit card payments for students that did not have their own PayPal accounts.

As the pandemic eased in the summer of 2021, Silver Music Studios resumed in-person lessons for the students who preferred it, but continues to offer distance-learning for others. One business-building side-effect of offering remote lessons is that Silver Music Studios can offer lessons to anyone, anywhere. Most music schools lose students when they move away to attend college, but Silver Music Studios has been able to retain more students now that the remote-learning option is available. Today, the school boasts students from all across America and several foreign countries