Japan is the most musically ambitious country. And it wants to play the piano

Japan is three times as interested in learning to play a musical instrument as the average country

People in Japan search to learn an instrument three times as often as adults in the average ranked country, well ahead of the United States (1.7 times) and Australia (1.6). Japan searches for music lessons at six times the rate of Italy, a country famous for its musical prowess. Two thirds of its instrument searches are for piano.

At the other end of the table, the gap is fifteenfold: Colombia, South Korea and Spain close out the ranking at 0.2, 0.35 and 0.45 times the average. One reading note applies to the top and bottom alike: Google handles only 74% of searches in Japan and 48% in South Korea, averaged over the search window, so those two figures lean on the market-share correction more than the rest of the table and carry more uncertainty.

It’s also worth noting that Japan’s lead reflects an old piano habit, not a recent boom. Demand there is actually falling: Google Trends puts Japanese searches for piano schools (ピアノ教室) at 27% below their 2021 peak. Japan still ranks first because it started so far ahead. Music is a compulsory school subject through junior high (national curriculum). Japanese makers shaped the instrument itself: Osaka-founded Roland launched the world’s first electronic piano with a touch-sensitive keyboard in 1974.

Below Japan, the table belongs to the English-speaking world and the small, rich north: the United States and Australia come in second and third, then Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria and Canada sit inside a narrow band. Europe’s biggest music markets sit lower. The United Kingdom is ninth, Germany eleventh, and France, for all its conservatoires, comes in just 17th of the 26 countries ranked.

Keep one pairing from this table in mind: Ireland, Europe’s highest placed nation at 1.5 times the average, and Norway, in the lower half at half Ireland’s rate. Two small, rich northern countries, one wide gap. Why they split is this study’s last question.

The world wants to play the piano

So much for who wants to learn. But which instrument do they want to play? To answer that, we tracked the popularity of five instruments in every country: piano, guitar, violin, the drums and singing. Across the 28 countries we could measure reliably (all 32 minus the four with thin local-language data), piano is the most-searched instrument of the five and is named in 38% of the searches that specify an instrument. Piano is the most popular option in 13 countries, including the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Japan. The guitar is named in 25% of these searches and is the most popular named instrument in seven countries: Ireland, New Zealand, Poland, Mexico, Brazil, Italy and Colombia. Finland would rather sing, South Korea’s Google searches lean towards drums, India’s English-language searches towards singing, while in five countries the race is too close to call.

Why does the piano win overall? It depends on how people search. When people want to teach themselves (for example using keywords like “learn guitar”, “how to play guitar”), guitar wins with 62% of these searches compared with 38% for the piano. When people look for lessons (using keywords like “piano lessons” or “piano lessons near me”), piano wins, with 66% of the search volume versus 34% for the guitar. Lesson searches are the bigger group, occupying about three quarters of all piano and guitar searches, and three times the self-taught ones. So, the piano’s lead there decides the overall result. The conclusion is clear. Guitar is the instrument people teach themselves. Piano is the instrument people take lessons for.

The outside datasets that measure learning agree: among Americans who have never learned an instrument but wish they had, 47% name piano as their instrument of choice, while just 22% would opt for the guitar (YouGov, 2022). This is reflected in Europe too, with data from German public music schools confirming approximately 160,000 piano enrolments in comparison with 117,500 for guitar.

There is one area where guitar comes out on top, and that’s the number of amateur musicians already playing the instrument. Germany’s Allensbach survey of amateur musicians aged 16 and over (fieldwork winter 2024/25) found that 28% of them play guitar and just 24% play the piano. Our search data, which counts people trying to start, shows more Germans are currently looking for piano lessons than guitar lessons.

Guitar searches halved across continental Europe. The piano held up far better

Since 2016, searches to learn the guitar have fallen by half or more in Germany, France, Spain and Italy, and by two thirds in Brazil. In the United States they are down just 6%, in the United Kingdom 11%. The index is a seven-month snapshot, so to see which way demand is heading we followed the same query, “learn guitar” and “learn piano” in each country’s language on Google Trends from 2016 to 2025. We then compared each country against its 2016 level.

The piano fell too, but by far less (2016 = 100): Germany 70, France 78, Spain 68, Brazil 73, Italy 87. In the United States and the United Kingdom it is flat.

Most guitar searches spiked during lockdown in 2020 and then dropped, though Germany’s search volume barely rose even then (up just 4% on 2019, while UK interest jumped 52%). Every guitar line outside the US and UK ends 2025 at half or less of where it started. The German music-school enrolments we cited earlier tell the same story in enrolments rather than searches (VdM statistics via miz.org):

• Guitar: 137,000 enrolments in 2013, 128,600 in 2019, 117,500 in 2021. The decline began before the pandemic, even though the association has counted more broadly since 2014 (the whole year rather than one reference date).
• Piano: 159,000, 164,900 and 160,100 for the same period, indicating stagnant demand.

Within music learning, the guitar is the loser, not the search engine.

Could this just be learners moving to YouTube and TikTok instead of Google? We checked against Google’s own Music Education & Instruction search category, which counts every search Google classifies as music education, in any language and any phrasing. That category fell far less. Interest in Germany was down 10% from 2016 to 2025, France 17%, Italy 16%, Spain 23%, and in the United States it has been recovering since 2021. Japan’s category line is flat. A wholesale move away from Google would drag the whole category down with the guitar. It did not: within music learning, the guitar is the loser, not the search engine. Brazil is the one exception where the whole category fell by 41%. The category check shows people did not leave Google overall, but guitar learners may well have moved to YouTube and guitar apps faster than piano learners did. Some of that shift is surely in these numbers; it cannot explain the whole gap between the guitar and everything else. The data shows us that the decline that runs through continental Europe and Brazil has taken place gradually and started well before the pandemic.

The piano beats every national instrument. Some come close

The piano hasn’t only outlasted the guitar in popularity. Most countries also have a national instrument, so we asked Google the same question about those: does anyone want to learn it? We found a qualifying national instrument for 26 of the 28 countries measured; the chart shows the 25 with solid local data (Finland’s baseline is too thin to rate). Each country’s pick is the candidate from Wikipedia’s list of national instruments that people search for most by name: the bandoneón for Argentina, the Alphorn for Switzerland, the shamisen for Japan, the harmonium for India, and, in ten countries from Norway to Mexico, the accordion. In every one of them the piano draws more learning demand than the national instrument, but in a few places the local instrument comes close. Brazil’s pandeiro draws 78% as much learning demand as the piano, Austria’s Steirische Harmonika 43%, Poland’s accordion 40%.

At the other end, the instruments that stand for a country are rarely the ones anyone tries to learn. Switzerland’s Alphorn draws 11% of the piano’s learning demand; Argentina’s bandoneón, which is the sound of tango, is the focus of only a handful of searches a month. So is Sweden’s nyckelharpa. Japan’s shamisen draws 4,400 searches, and even that is just one twentieth of Japan’s piano demand in Japanese. The American banjo is the biggest heritage market in absolute terms (6,800 learning searches a month) while Brazil’s pandeiro is second (5,600). The heritage instrument people learn in the most countries is the accordion. It is the most-searched folk instrument in 10 of the 25 charted countries, and in Poland, Italy, the Netherlands and Norway it retains about 30% to 40% of the piano’s demand. Elsewhere it draws far less: in France, 7%.

Why Ireland searches twice as much as Norway

The instruments a nation claims as its own are not the ones it wants to learn. So, what influences how much a country wants to learn an instrument? The strongest clue we found is institutional. Across the 13 ranked European countries with comparable figures, a pattern emerges. Where a country has more people practising some form of art, there are also more searches for musical tuition (r = 0.55). Practising art here means doing it yourself, not watching: the share of people aged 16 and over who practised an artistic activity in the last 12 months (Eurostat EU-SILC 2022). Playing an instrument is only one such activity, and Germany is not in the chart because it did not collect these figures in the 2022 survey.

Two countries break the pattern. Norway and Ireland practise art at almost the same rate (48% and 45% respectively), but split sharply on how often they search to learn an instrument. Ireland has Europe’s highest demand for musical tuition, while Norway has just half of that and sits in the lower half of the table. One plausible reason: Norway’s municipal culture schools (known as kulturskole) must be offered to all children and young people in every Norwegian municipality by law. This practice enables Norwegians to learn an instrument earlier in life, meaning many don’t need to search Google for musical tuition later on. Ireland is the mirror case: Irish adults exhibit Europe’s strongest appetite to learn, and with no public music-school system to absorb it, Google searches abound. Instrumental tuition is overwhelmingly private, with the main state-backed programme reaching only about 10% of children.

That may be the quiet finding underneath the whole index: Google measures the ambition a country’s institutions leave unmet. Read that way, Japan stops being a contradiction: its schools nurture the desire to learn, but a Japanese learner still has to find private lessons, and that is exactly the search we count. Where music schools exist and have places available for young learners, those later-in-life Google searches never materialise. Where learners must go looking, the demand shows up here.

Find your country

Pick a country: its rank, its instrument split, and how its national instrument fares against the piano.

All 32 countries, 26 ranked

One row per country: the Ambition Index (1.0 = the average of the 26 ranked countries), the underlying search rate, and the most-wanted instrument. The six greyed rows at the bottom are measured but not ranked. Search or sort.

Monthly averages, August 2025 to February 2026. Unranked rows: Greece, Czechia, Romania and Hungary rest mostly on English-language searches with much of the local basket below Google’s reporting floor; India and South Africa were measured in English only against an all-adults denominator, so their rates are floors.