Everyone remembers the lockdown guitar. Three million Amazon reviews tell a stranger story: the boom showed up months behind schedule, and when the dust settled, it was the microphones that stayed.
The story we all carry from 2020 goes like this: the world locked down in March, everyone panic-bought a guitar, and Google searches for “beginner guitar chords” went vertical. So when we pulled every Amazon review ever written in the Musical Instruments category — about three million of them — we expected April 2020 to be the loudest month in the data.
It's the quietest April since 2017.
The catch is that a review is written when a box arrives, not when a desire forms. And in April 2020 the boxes weren't arriving: Amazon had throttled fulfillment of non-essential goods to prioritize medical supplies and household staples. Demand surged into a pipe that had been narrowed. The result, visible below, is a boom with a hole in it — a sharp dip exactly where the legend says the spike should be, followed by a long, elevated plateau that runs from late summer 2020 through spring 2021 and peaks, of all places, in March 2021, at 1.8× its 2019 level.
Zoom out to the whole category and the shape is unmistakable. December towers over every year (instruments are gifts), 2019 runs meaningfully above 2018 — and then April 2020 falls off a cliff while the world was supposedly ordering guitars. The recovery isn't a return to trend; it's an overshoot that lasts three quarters.
This reframes what the “pandemic instrument boom” was. In this data, 2020 as a whole is only 13% above 2019 — modest, for the biggest hobby shock in a generation. What actually happened is a rotation: a temporary hobby wave (ukuleles up, then down 52% below baseline by 2022) layered on top of a durable structural shift toward the creator economy. Microphone and studio-equipment reviews were still running above their pre-pandemic level in 2022, after the hobby wave had fully receded. People bought guitars to pass a lockdown; they bought microphones to change what they do.
Two slower stories run underneath the volume chart. The first is about the ratings themselves. Average stars climbed for fifteen years — from about 3.9 in 2004 to a peak of 4.34 in 2019 — and then went into reverse, sliding to 4.10 by 2022. Cohort analysis in the data says the decline is real, not just a mix shift: products that entered the catalog in 2021 carry systematically lower ratings than the 2013–2016 entrants did at the same age.
The second story is about the review essay, and it's a eulogy. In 2004 the median review ran 126 words — people wrote reviews. By 2016 the median verified-purchase review was 16 words, and it never recovered. The gap between verified and unverified reviewers is striking: people who didn't buy the product on Amazon still write three times as much as people who did.
Put together, the three charts describe a marketplace that industrialized its own feedback loop: more reviews, shorter reviews, higher stars — until the pandemic threw millions of new buyers at the system and the stars finally started drifting back to earth.
Source: Amazon Reviews 2023 (McAuley Lab, UCSD), Musical Instruments category: 3,017,439 reviews of 213,593 products, extracted 2026-07-09 with DuckDB and validated against the dataset card (exact match). Subcategories come from each product's category path. Charts show 3–6 month moving averages where noted; Figure 1 indexes each subcategory to its own 2019 monthly average. Review text was truncated for storage; word counts were computed before truncation.
Reviews measure review-writing, not sales; Amazon's own collection mechanics (one-tap ratings, review solicitation) changed over the period. Data ends September 2023; charts stop at December 2022 to avoid the partial-year tail. Prices in the companion dataset are 2023 snapshot prices. Reviewer identities are pseudonymous and never shown.
Data © McAuley Lab, research release — cite Hou et al. (2024), arXiv:2403.03952. Article text and figures: CC BY 4.0.