#16: Inside Scoop: Kawai Shares the Trends Reshaping your Piano Teaching With Warrick Baker, GM of Kawai
BLOG: Have you ever lost a student?
It happens to every piano teacher. And most of us take it personally when it probably isn't personal at all.
Warwick Baker, General Manager of Kawai Australia, has been thinking about this question from a different angle - the angle of someone who has watched the piano industry evolve for decades and who speaks with piano teachers and parents and students all over the country.
I sat down with him at Top Music Live in Sydney, and what he shared might just change how you think about piano lessons and student retention.
Who is Warwick Baker?
Warwick Baker is the General Manager of Kawai Australia - one of the world's leading piano manufacturers, approaching its 100th anniversary in 2027!
Warwick is deeply committed to the idea that supporting piano teachers is the most important thing a piano company can do - because without great teachers, there are no piano students.
Why Students are Quitting Piano - It's Not What You Think
The most common reason teachers give for losing students is practice.
They didn't practice. The parents didn't support it. The child lost motivation.
But Warwick points to something deeper.
The children sitting in front of us today have brains that are being shaped by an unprecedented level of digital stimulation. Notifications. Screens. Content available every second of every day.
The result is an attention span that is genuinely different from previous generations - different in ways that require us to adapt.
"The attention piece is really important. Trying to maintain that attention both when they're not in the lesson and when they need to practice at home - we live in such a disruptive world."
This isn't a parenting problem or a student problem. It's a context problem. And the teachers who understand that context - and adapt to it - are the ones whose students stay.
Getting Parents Invested Changes Everything
Here is one of the most powerful ideas in this conversation.
When a child says they want to quit piano, the parent's response makes all the difference.
If the parent is invested emotionally - if they understand why piano lessons matter, if they have been part of the journey, if they can see the progress their child is making - they are far more likely to say: let's keep going, let's work through this.
If the parent is not invested, they hear their child say I don't want to go and think: Yay, one less thing to do this week!
"If we don't bring the parents with us on the teaching journey, sometimes when the child says I'm kind of done with this, the parents go - ok, I am too."
This is one of the most important retention strategies available to any piano teacher.
Communicate with parents. Help them understand what their child is building. Get them involved and excited about progress and activities. Show them the progress that isn't always visible in a piece of music - the focus, the coordination, the discipline, the executive function that develops lesson by lesson.
When parents understand what piano lessons are really doing for their child, they become your greatest allies in keeping that child engaged.
The Attention Crisis is an Opportunity in Disguise
It would be easy to read all of this as bad news for piano teachers. But Warwick sees the opposite.
The very skills that screens are quietly eroding - sustained attention, the ability to work toward a long-term goal, the capacity to sit with something difficult and keep going - are exactly the skills that piano lessons build.
Piano lessons are, in many ways, the antidote to the attention crisis.
"Cognitive development. We're not just teaching music. We're teaching mathematics. We're teaching physics. We're teaching discipline. These are the life skills that come from music lessons."
The teacher who can articulate this to parents - who can say, clearly and confidently, here is what your child is building every time they sit at this piano - is the teacher whose studio grows.
What’s a Hybrid Piano and Why Does it Matter?
One of the most practical conversations in this episode is about hybrid pianos - and why they are changing what's possible for piano students in modern homes.
A hybrid piano is exactly what it sounds like. It is a real acoustic piano - full hammer action, strings, soundboard, everything - with a digital sensor rail that makes it completely silent when you want it to be.
So it plays like an acoustic piano. It feels like an acoustic piano. And when you put on headphones, the rest of the household hears nothing.
For families in apartments, townhouses, or small homes - which is increasingly where people live - this changes everything.
"When you want to play at 10 or 11 pm at night, headphones on, off you go."
For piano teachers, this matters because instrument access is one of the most common barriers to student retention. If a family doesn't have a suitable instrument at home, practice doesn't happen. And when practice doesn't happen, progress stalls, motivation drops, and students quit.
A hybrid piano removes that barrier completely.
Why Group Lessons are Breaking the Mould
Warwick doesn't just talk about instruments. He talks about the social experience of learning music - and why the traditional model of one student sitting alone at a piano is quietly becoming a disadvantage.
"Piano is a very insular product. We sit in the corner by ourselves. Breaking that mould and using that orchestra ensemble community to create groups lets them have fun. Let them bounce off their friends."
The social environment of group learning is not just more enjoyable. It is more effective. Students motivate each other. They listen more carefully when peers are playing. They develop a musical awareness that solo learning simply cannot replicate.
And in a world where children's attention is being competed for by every app on every device, a lesson that is social, energetic, and genuinely fun is a lesson that children want to come back to.
The Bigger Picture
Here is what stayed with me from this conversation.
The piano world is at a turning point. The students arriving in our studios are different from the students who arrived 10-20 years ago. The homes they live in are different. The way their attention works is different.
This is not a crisis. It’s an invitation to evolve.
The teachers who understand what is changing - who can articulate the deeper value of what they offer, who bring parents into the journey, who create lessons that are social and engaging and genuinely worth a child's time - are the ones who will thrive.
"It's about widening that breadth of how we approach this to get the best benefit for the community."
That's not just a message for piano companies. It's a message for every piano teacher sitting in a studio wondering why things feel harder than they used to.
The answer isn't to teach more of the same.
The answer is to meet students where they are - and show them what music can do for their lives.
Listen to Episode 16
🎧 Listen to Episode 16 - Why Students Quit Piano and What You Can Do About It
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