Piano Video Lesson: Are Ivory Piano Keys Worth Anything?

Hi, this is Robert Estern at livingpianos.com and virtualsheetmusic.com with another viewer question. A viewer asks, "I have an old piano with ivory keys and I'm replacing it with plastic. Should I save the ivories? Are they worth something?" Well that's a really good question. The fact is, selling ivory is illegal.

Did you know that on eBay, if you even list anything with the word "ivory" in it your listing will be taken down? They have filters for that so you can't even...if you had a piano with ivory keys and you wanted to advertise "real ivory keys", you can't on eBay. The transportation of ivory overseas, as I mentioned earlier in other videos, is also illegal. So the question is what would you do with those ivories? You can't really sell them very easily because the trade of ivory is tightly controlled. The best thing you could do is give them to your piano tuner, who might be able to offer them as fixes for people who might be missing some ivory keys, as I discussed in a previous video.

So that's the long and short of it. Really they're not...you'd think they're valuable, and a few years ago before the laws tightened a set of ivory would cost thousands of dollars, but today I would not recommend selling ivory. The laws are tightly regulated and for good reason, to protect elephants. So if you have old ivories give them away. I wouldn't recommend selling them.

Thanks for the great question and thanks to all of you for the questions coming in here to Robert@LivingPianos.com, here also at virtualsheetmusic.com. See you next time.

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