Piano Man Superstore in College Park, Maryland, downsizing, moving

Nick Marjaritas is no Billy Joel, but he nonetheless considers himself the Piano Man — so much so that he applied the name to his store in College Park.

But after seven years at its location on the 9500 block of Baltimore Avenue, the Piano Man Superstore this month is moving — and downsizing — to facility in Rockville.

Mr. Marjaritas says that although more people are playing the piano than ever before, fewer are actually buying the musical instruments. It’s a trend music shops across the country are experiencing.

“If you are in the piano industry, it’s like the frog [dissection] in biology class. It just creeps up on you,” he said of the decline in sales.

U.S. sales have fallen steadily from 95,518 pianos sold in 2005 to 30,516 sold last year, according to the market and opinion research statistics website Statista.

After the Great Recession of 2008, Mr. Marjaritas says he noticed a “serious drop, virtually overnight” in piano sales, and he fears how another recession would affect the industry.

“Historically, pianos go first in a recession because it is a capital expenditure. It is perhaps the second largest purchase in the house after the car,” he said. “It is a 500-pound ship’s anchor in the living room.”

So now he is selling all of his 300-piano inventory at the 30,000-square-foot superstore in College Park, and will relocate to a 3,000-square-foot store with 30 pianos in Rockville by the end of the year.

In the early 1970s, Mr. Marjaritas realized that selling pianos could be a lucrative business when he took out an advertisement to sell his own piano — and received calls from 20 would-be buyers.

As baby boomers were coming of piano-playing age, Mr. Marjaritas saw a market for used pianos and rented a house for $100 a month in 1974 in Baltimore County’s Lansdowne neighborhood, where he sold pianos on the first floor and lived on the second.

Since then, he estimates that he has sold thousands of used pianos from storefronts in Maryland — about 30 a month.

He moved to his current location when the building’s previous occupant, Jordan Kitt’s Music, sold him all of its inventory and vacated the space in its own downsizing move.

This isn’t his first store-closing sale at the College Park location: Mr. Marjaritas said that his lease agreement has allowed the landlord to replace his piano store with a more profitable tenant, but those deals fell through for the landlord. Now he’s leaving on his own terms.

He began playing piano at the age of 5 but says he didn’t immediately fall in love with it.

“It was a keyboard on cardboard on a desk,” Mr. Marjaritas said.

His older brother played, and his family always had a piano in the house, which helped him stick with the hobby that eventually turned into a career.

Mr. Marjaritas also owns a 3,000-square-foot storefront in Catonsville, where he grew up.

He says he hasn’t settled yet on a Rockville location, but he plans to complete the transition by the end of the year.