2024 STars hall of fame

Skip Maggiora

April 19, 1947 – February 23, 2023

Founder, Skip’s Music & Lifelong Sacramento Musician

Encina HS ‘65

Arthur “Skip” Maggiora was a recognized entrepreneur and businessman in our region for most of his life. Arthur Maggiora, the man Sacramento and the national music community would forever come to know as “Skip,” grew up around music.

At the early age of thirteen, Skip traded in his elementary school trumpet for a guitar and within a year started his own teaching business. He went on to play in local bands and worked his way through college at Sacramento State University majoring in Engineering.

While Skip and his band were fortunate to be hired regularly by some of the touring artists that would come to town and would eventually become the “house band” at The Sound Factory (a local Fillmore style venue), Skip realized quickly that in order to be “discovered,” your band needed to be seen. Skip wanted to find a way to be on the every bill that came to town, so in the mid to late 1960s Skip and his fellow band members accomplished this goal by hiring headlining major acts to close the show for them: “ Let’s book and promote the concert ourselves!”

In 1973, Skip’s passion for music grew into his first retail music store in South Sacramento. In 1980, just as Sacramento’s rock music scene was entering a fertile decade, with local acts Steel Breeze, Bourgeois Tagg and Tesla, along with guitarists Jeff Watson of Night Ranger and Dokken’s George Lynch reaching national prominence, Skip’s Music moved to its signature Auburn Boulevard location.

From day one, people came to Skip not simply for his expertise on the gear he was selling, but also for his knowledge of how to make things happen in the growing music industry. While Skip’s Music became the store that you could depend on to demo and purchase professional quality gear, Skip could still be found backstage at local concerts supporting music making and /or helping to solve issues that might arise related to the stage equipment.

Skip was also a founding member of AIMM, the Alliance of Independent Music Merchants, LLC. AIMM was founded in 1998 to help lead the music products industry to meet the evolving needs of music makers by bringing together the industry’s leading independent musical instrument retailers with select vendors for the benefit of music makers nationwide.