The story of Music Experience begins back in 2013, when Werner Botha met Andreas Barth by coincidence selling a "Hall of Fame" Reverb pedal to him in Cape Town. With Werner moving down from Nelspruit after 6 years as manager at Harry Green Music World, he was motivated to find a niche in the market to start a new instrument shop based on passion and service excellence.
At this point in time, Andreas was running a private boutique guitar business from home, “Guitar Experience”, trading high value and collectible guitars. With the increase in demand for these instruments, it made perfect sense to grow this business into a brick and mortar retailer, and in October 2013 Music Experience was born.
With humble beginnings in a highly competitive market and multiple well established traders already in Cape Town, the odds were stacked against this new venture. Many industry critics predicted that Music Experience would not make it, especially with a young 25 year old from out of town leading from the front. Werner and Andreas worked tirelessly to get the ball rolling, and in a short period of time managed to establish a loyal customer base.
The Music Experience strategy was always to find ways to set them apart from their opposition, with the key focus on customer service and stocking brands that were quite unfamiliar in Sout Africa. Over the years Music Experience managed to become the exclusive distributor for numerous agencies that include Duesenberg, Alvarez, Schecter, Furch, Danelectro and Antelope Audio. All these brands contributed to establish Music Experience’s own identity, and develop it to the success it is today. The business has achieved various honours, and take great pride in being dealer of the year for leading brands like Nord, CF Martin and Fender Custom Shop a few times.
With an ever growing reputation, Music Experience became a serious name in our local market, gaining a lot of respect from musicians and industry leaders. The shop offers the best brands in the business, from beautiful showrooms with the focus on offering expert knowledge by well trained staff. With both Werner and Andreas very connected in the industry, they have done multiple aritst collaborations, working with some of the country's favourite musicians. It is very common to pop into Music Experience and bump into the likes of Arno Carstens, Dan Patlansky, Mauritz Lotz, Karen Zoid or Francois van Coke, just to name a few.
In December 2024 Music Experience opened a second store in Nelspruit, which now gave them a foot in the door in Mpumalanga, but also servicing neighbouring countries Mozambique and Swaziland from this new location. This new business even though still in its infancy stage, has already shown promising results and can only grow from strength to strength.
Exciting times lie ahead for Music Experience, and with the business growing year on year, the future certainly looks bright. With an ever evolving industry, the business has always managed to improvise and adapt to new ways of trading. With a well established online presence and the highest Google Review rating in the trade, the business will no doubt continue to live up to their slogan that:
It's Not Just A Shop...IT'S AN EXPERIENCE!
