Music & Arts Center, Inc.

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The first Music & Arts Center was located in a small house in Bethesda, Maryland, and run by founder Benjamin O'Brien (on the left, in the photo, with his father, John). That first store offered music lessons, music and art supplies plus dance lessons - thus the name Music & Arts. Since its beginning in 1952, the company gradually expanded outside the MD/VA area, adding retail stores in Atlanta, the Philadelphia area, the Carolinas, Nashville, Denver and most recently, the Northeast. With 62 stores throughout the East Coast and Colorado, Music & Arts Center soon became one of the largest retail music store chains serving a huge network of school band and orchestra programs. In 1998, the corporate headquarters moved from Rockville, Maryland, to Frederick, Maryland.On February 9th, 2005, Guitar Center announced the acquisition of Music & Arts Center and its plans to merge Music & Arts Center with its American Music Group division. The new company took on the name of Music & Arts Center, creating an 82 store retail music chain that spans from coast to coast. Employing 1500 employees, 330 affiliate dealers, and annual instrument rentals of over 150,000, Music & Arts Center has become the largest school music dealer in the nation.American Music Group was founded by Bob Scheiwiller in 1970 and was a classic school music service company for nearly three decades. Built on band and orchestra rentals, the company focused its efforts on road reps calling on educators. The 20 American Music Group stores were more like offices than stores: a front counter, behind which several reps and clerical personnel worked the phones and computers. From the outset more than three decades ago, the goal was to provide school music products to multiple markets nationally. Over the years, the company has grown to service markets in the Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, and Southwest. Along the way, American Music also became active in mail-order retailing through its LMI and Giardinelli catalogs and in wholesaling via its GBI Distributing division. In April, 2001, Guitar Center announced the acquisition of American Music Group. The $17 million dollar deal merged one of the nation's leading school music dealerships with the publicly traded Guitar Center, by far the industry's largest retailer with annual sales in excess of $1 billion in 2002. While the education reps and student rentals remained American Music's core business, the company began to broaden its horizons with the addition of combo instruments.

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