Rent or Buy?

The idea of renting sounds good—monthly payments are cheaper than purchasing, and you can walk away if it doesn’t work out.

That is exactly what your student is thinking: “Hey, I can quit this any time, it’s not mine.”
No, I’m not a fan of renting. There is a very real difference in students who picked out an instrument themselves and own the instrument versus those who rent one. I ran a community school of the arts for thirteen years and saw this over and over.The real down side of renting is that, when you add up the costs, you pay two to four times than the cost of an outright purchase.

No fooling on that one--I just searched "rent a student flute" and got the price of $280 for nine months. Take a look at our student flutes. We have several below $200...and the shipping is free!

It is also common for many music stores to rent instruments that have been returned, so your instrument is not really new. If you don’t establish that fact up front, you will end up paying for a new instrument but not getting one. Three years later, when the contract is paid off, who remembers?

They also dangle “free repairs” as a benefit to you. It is highly unlikely that you will need many repairs. I prefer to have my students (all of them – owners and renters) take broken instruments to our local music store where the owner will fix it and get it back in a day or less. He is a great repairman, so I know it is fixed correctly and my student doesn’t miss band or practicing. The average wait for rental repairs from the contract music stores where I live is two weeks—way too long for a student to wait.

What do you do if the worst happens and your student quits or changes instruments? You own a good-quality instrument that you can sell or trade in on another instrument.

Some band and music departments keep listings of instruments for sale, you can take out a newspaper ad, put a free ad on Craigslist, or put up notices in the grocery stores and laundromats. The demand is highest for beginner instruments, so they are easiest to sell. The most demand is in the early fall, as that is when most band programs start their fifth or sixth grade beginners.