Podcasts drive international sales for music store

The Acoustic Shoppe LLC got its start in 2013 when a trio of musicians bought a building at 1913 E. Seminole St. purely so they would have a place to teach music.

That group – Jeremy, John and Jason Chapman – started stocking a few instruments in the space, and today it has a wide selection of guitars, mandolins, banjos, ukuleles and more. All of the instruments are acoustic, the shop’s specialty.

Jeremy Chapman, president and CEO, said he and his brothers saw a niche among local music stores that focused more on band and electric instruments.

“We thought there might be a market for acoustics,” he said. “Nobody else was doing it.”

Today, the store, though small, is amply stocked with lines of instruments against its wood-grained walls, and stylish furnishings offer an opportunity for musicians to sit and pick. And revenue is on the rise.

In 2020, during the pandemic, the team purchased the modest ranch-style house located behind the store, and that became their shipping center – team members box instruments in the two-car garage, with the doors open on nice days. The domestic annex also houses the studio where the brothers record the store’s two podcasts, Shoppe-Talk Wednesday Live Stream and The Acoustic Shoppe Knows People. The channel also includes product reviews.

A March 2026 interview with Emmy Award-winning actor and guitar enthusiast Jeff Daniels helped bring national and international attention to the Springfield store, pushing the number of YouTube subscribers to roughly 116,000.

The Acoustic Shoppe Knows People series is available as a video podcast on YouTube and Spotify and as an audio podcast on all major platforms, Chapman said.

Podcast highlights
Springfield is the home of a legendary bluegrass banjo artist, Alan Munde, who was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 2024. In one of his Acoustic Shoppe podcast appearances, in May 2019, Munde noted he was not just a guest, but a customer of the store.

“Music stores are the perfect place to hang out if you’re interested in music,” Munde said in the conversation that followed a jam session with the Chapman brothers.

By that, Munde meant there are guitars and other instruments hanging on the walls, and a customer can try out one pick instead of purchasing a gross.

“With the big corporate stores, they have a whole different feel,” he said. “This is the kind of music store that would have been around basically when I was a kid.”

An acoustic enthusiast who is famous even outside of traditional music circles is Emmy Award-winning actor Daniels, who joined The Acoustic Shoppe Knows People in March of this year from his home in Michigan. Behind Daniels is a wall featuring two rows of instruments, metal-body resonators on top and conventional acoustic on bottom – some of them purchased from The Acoustic Shoppe.

Chapman said he reached out to Daniels on a hunch, based on the address they shipped to, that it may be the actor and avid picker. He said he had some compunctions about doing so; after all, customers should be afforded privacy. The brothers waited for him to show up via a live feed, and until they saw his face, they weren’t quite sure if they would be getting the famous Jeff Daniels or some other guy.

They figured they’d do the show either way, with vastly different outcomes – but they admitted they were relieved to get the real deal.

Daniels described his picking strategy, called Travis picking, which he likened to rubbing your tummy while patting your head. It’s a style that uses the thumb for a bass line and melody notes played with the first two fingers for a full sound that provides its own accompaniment.

In the interview, Daniels indulges in a deep discussion of music after noting that in the typical television interview, his offers to play music are typically rejected.

He also talks about the overlap between acting and music, pointing out that the pleasure in either activity is in being transported by it.

“That’s when it gets enjoyable, when you start to play, and you just let it take you,” he said. “You ride it, like a horse.”

The discussion, which includes appreciation of instruments and techniques, turns to artistry in general.

“There’s good and there’s great,” Daniels said. “You can be good, and that’s fine, but if you want to be great, you’ve got to outwork everybody who’s content with just being good – and ‘good’ is a close cousin to ‘good enough.’ The really great people I’ve been fortunate enough to work with, that’s the difference.”

The X factor
Any retailer benefits from a unique value proposition or differentiator. For The Acoustic Shoppe, that difference is in the keen understanding of its instruments.

For starters, the brothers have the experience that comes from touring internationally with their father for three decades as part of a family bluegrass band called The Chapmans. The band is still under contract with Compass Records.

“We were on the road like 200 days a year, and we wanted to start slowing down,” Chapman said. “We got married and started having kids.”

But the brothers are not the only musicians involved in The Acoustic Shoppe. Chapman said the employees all play music and can converse about the qualities of the instruments the shop offers – each a little different from the others. With the international attention brought by the shop’s podcasts has come increased sales, he said, and customers are interested in seeing each instrument individually, rather than a standard shot of an instrument model. The differences can be seen in the wood grain, according to Chapman.

The online content is another distinctive element.

“We kind of describe ourselves as a content-creating company that sells guitars, because we do split our week,” Chapman said. “I’d say we spend half our time filming content. We’ve got as many crew and staff in our media department as we do on the rest of the sales team.”

The interest in the store’s content has reaped rewards, according to Chapman, who noted that about 80% of the store’s sales are online, with about 100 shipments going out each week.

Yet another differentiator comes in the business education Chapman received by participating in the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, which includes a multiweek curriculum designed by Babson College, a leading school for entrepreneurship.

Chapman said the store has averaged about 35% year-over-year growth since it opened, even in times when markets have slowed. For some companies, COVID-19 was a business-killer, but it turned out to be a good time to take up new skills, from making sourdough bread to taking up the banjo.

Last year, the store’s revenue was $3.5 million, Chapman said, and the company is on pace for $4.5 million in revenue this year.

“The online part of it has grown a lot,” he said.

A framed rendering of an expanded store is on the wall of Chapman’s office. It will have a larger footprint comprising two stories, with rooms for people to try out instruments. The expansion is a longer-range plan, though; the near-term plan is to put a metal building behind the store for instrument inspections and shipping.

Meanwhile, the existing store offers a compact but warm welcome. Chapman said members of the shop’s online community stop in for a visit when they’re in the area.

Often, he knows them not by their real names but by their more colorful online handles. Chapman said it’s fun to put a face to an online identity.

“It’s fun to see people saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to Branson, but I told my wife we’d have to come by The Acoustic Shoppe first,’” he said.