8 Shocking Reasons Why Families Pay ‘Through Their Nose’ For Private Piano Lessons

Do private piano lessons for your kids, cost you an arm and a foot? Or have you been scared to enrol your kids in private piano lessons, simply because you are unsure if you can sustain the cost over many years?

If so, you are going to love this post, as I explain why private piano lessons are often so expensive. 

Short Lessons

Usually piano lessons are about 30 minutes or so per week. While it is often touted that this is because teaching for longer durations can be counter productive, it doesn’t always have to be so. 

If appropriate teaching methods are used, lessons can be made longer and costs not allowed to increase as much. 

With short lessons, the teacher’s travel (if the teacher visits your home) and other overhead costs are spread across a smaller fee, which can then be quite high. 

For instance if the teacher believes she spends about $5 on travel to your home, then her half hourly rate of $25 will increase to $30 to make up for the travel cost. On the other hand if you have an hourly lesson instead of costing $60 it will cost $55 ($25+$25+$5). 

Weekly Lessons

Taking the above point further, short weekly classes can be quite expensive, when compared to longer bi-weekly classes.

Lack of Practice

This is another reason, families end up paying so much for music lessons. 

When children don’t practice what they have learned, they cannot move ahead in lessons and continue to plateau in certain sections. 

So parents end up paying for repetition of the same material instead of having the kids learn new material. 

Thus learning can take longer and the cumulative costs can sky-rocket. 

No Additional Learning

Focusing only on private piano lessons and not supplementing the piano lessons with other lessons, also make private piano lessons very expensive. 

When parents aren’t willing to supplement routine, easy aspects of learning piano with online classes, on the contrary wanting it all covered by the private piano teacher, costs can be extremely high.

Studio Overheads

Learning at a piano studio often is very expensive, because of all the overheads the piano teacher has to pay for, which get passed on to the parents. 

Rent for piano studios, equipment that your children don’t even use and much more are counted in the overhead cost and added to the tuition, thus resulting in parents paying many costs that their kids don’t avail themselves of. 

Lessons Per Child

There is an inherent belief that the best type of piano education is the one on one piano classes. Thus, not being open to group classes or family lessons also end up costing parents quite a pretty penny. 

Material Cost

Purchasing brand new material for each child can also be very expensive.

Not Having A Clear Goal

Piano lessons without clear goals in mind can be very haphazard, and would be like you paying for a bus trip without knowing exactly where the bus is headed, and what stops will be made. 

When there is no real accountability on the part of the teacher, again families could end up paying ‘through their noses’ for private piano lessons. 

Have you been paying ‘through your nose’ for private piano lessons, and which of the above reasons has been it due to? I would really love to hear your thoughts.

Want to know more about how you can get more value from your child’s private piano lessons? Then read my post 6 ‘Sneaky’ But Awesome Ways To Get Double The Value From Private Piano Lessons.