The slow, secret death of the six-string electric

> In the past decade, electric guitar sales have plummeted, from about 1.5 million sold annually to just over 1 million.

As a guitarist, the number of new guitars, especially electric, sold always amazes me. Electric guitars are a pretty durable product. Short of leaving them outside or dropping one a fairly significant distance it's pretty tough to destroy even a marginally decent instrument. Additionally, the technology has changed significantly over the years. At its core, your average electric guitar is nearly identical to its late 1950's counterpart.

If we're selling a million guitars a year during what's considered a slowdown, that means there have probably been well over 50 million guitars sold since 1985. A lot of these were cheap junk and some were destroyed, but there are still an incredible numbers of decent quality instruments out there and it seems like the number of guitar players/owners is not growing (more likely shrinking), where are all these new guitars going?

My general impression is that a small portion of guitarists are collecting large (10+) collections, but that may just be based on social media making such collections more obvious.