What A Music Store Should Be

Sidney Musicworks is a locally owned family run music store in the heart of the town of Sidney, north of Victoria (Vancouver Island) that has been in business since 2001. After 3 years of operation in our first store, (which was only 500 square feet) we knew we would have to move or suffer serious injury from things falling on us. We moved one block up the same street to our new 1800 square foot store. We have been serving the Peninsula and Gulf Islands region for over 3 years from this location and have made every effort to maintain the personal nature of the business.

Teaching music is at the core of our business philosophy and we have brought together a fantastic staff of dedicated and educated teachers to our music school.  We can see the results in the 250 students that come through each week. Once yearly we hold a student recital as well as sponsor concerts which include our students at the local Winspear Theatre. We have five comfortable teaching studios each with an acoustic piano and including a drum studio.  It is only in the last two or three years that the chain music stores have started to offer music lessons so we have a few decades of experience that they do not have in this area.

The new location has allowed us to expand considerably in the products department as well and we are now dealers for some of the best brands in the industry including Crate, Behringer , Roland, Ibanez, Crafter, Tama, Alvarez, Godin and much more. Currently we stock a full lineup of everything from violins to cellos, double basses, pianos, keyboards, brass, woodwinds, mandolins, banjos, percussion as well as a  print music department and that's just a start.

Our staff is the best and all are active professionally and love to play. We think this makes a  difference when it comes to finding what you need, we really try to run it like a music store and not a big box take-a-number type of operation.

There are a lot of things that a small store can do that a large store cannot. For instance, we are not heavily committed to carrying any one line of instruments as the big retailers are and we don't favor items that we manufacture. Instead, we choose what we think is a great buy and great quality for the money. We make a very conscious effort to stay away from the lines that the big stores carry and instead try to select products that should be represented in the local market place and are not.

In keeping with our overall philosophy of "what a music store should be" we have an in-store repair shop and regular weekly pickups for brass and woodwind instrument repair. Our Band Rental program continues to grow each year as does our client base. In order to stay on top of things and keep alive in this very competitive world this year we are putting more time into our website so that we can easily reach our people on the Islands and the Peninsula and beyond.

We hope that having a music store in this neck of the woods will make for a more vibrant and musical community and we hope to be here for many years to come. So, come on in, we would love to meet you, and speak musician.