Pros
You get to work in music and develop your music knowledge. Networking is easy when everyone around you shares your interests. In theory the company holds excellent core values and promotes creating new musicians.
Cons
The company rarely hires internally for corporate positions, and even more rarely hires an active musician to fill corporate roles. Pay is low, the company actively does what it can to keep pay low. At one point I had to argue with my upper management to convince them that my full-time staff deserve higher pay than my part-time staff (who were being paid minimum wage) While these arguments raged on, corporate decided to restructure each stores wages hours allotment; cutting every store by at least 30 hours worth of employment and stranding employees in the store alone. The final 6 months of my employment at Music and Arts were outlined as such. Work 7.5 hours alone in my store. Responsibilities such as cleaning, merchandising, updating marketing materials, customer outreach, event coordinating, and grassroots campaigning were not reduced with the reduction in labor hours. I would have to close the store mid-day and clock out to take my state mandated break, but still keep the store phone on hand to help with customers who had inquiries. During renal season massive shipments of instruments were unable to be scheduled, and labor hours were not adjusted beyond the allowance of temp workers on high-volume forecast days, often leaving me alone to tend to a full store AND thousands of instruments that needed moving and sorting. Levels of control were taken from almost every aspect of management and reduced store managers to being the local music and arts punching bag when things went wrong. Despite all of this, my direct manager visited my store maybe three times a year since my store was on the far end of his district. Closer stores received monthly, if not weekly, help and input, while stores only an hour away were left to figure things out on their own.