Luke Muehlhauser

The classical music world is actively hostile to listeners

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Why is classical music (including new classical music) so unpopular? Part of it is because lots of classical music is dissonant, overly complex, long-winded, etc.,1 but it’s also because the classical music world is actively hostile to listeners. (I say this as someone who enjoys a ton of classical music!)

In particular, classical music is often:

  1. Unavailable:
    1. Outside the most popular ~350 classical composers, most works by most composers have never been commercially recorded (even if they’ve been performed repeatedly),2 making it almost impossible to hear them.3 For comparison, the 350th most popular/acclaimed rock music artist according to this aggregated list is Kings of Leon; imagine if most of their songs were available as notated scores and occasional live performances in specific cities but never actually recorded! That is the state of classical music listening.4
    2. When a new piece of classical music is premiered, it’s often not commercially recorded and released for several years, or even decades. Imagine hearing that your favorite musical artist played an entire new-album set in a city far away from you, but there’s no information on when the album will be released, and it might not come out for several years. Amazingly, this is standard practice in classical music, even for the most popular composers: e.g. Philip Glass’ Appomattox (2007), John Williams’ La Jolla (2011), and John Adams’ Second Quartet (2014) still haven’t been recorded and released, despite each being performed several times around the world.
  2. Hard to navigate / poorly promoted:
    1. Classical music critics typically recommend pieces based on their historical importance, innovativeness, or abstract music theory ideas rather than on how fun they are to listen to for most people. Many “classical music for beginners” lists include some honest selections like Pachelbel’s “Canon in D,” but also obvious lies such as Stravinsky’s wild, wandering, and dissonant Rite of Spring.5
    2. Classical music review books and websites are poorly organized, e.g. compositions and recordings often aren’t given any kind of rating or ranking, and they aren’t categorized into hundreds of precise stylistic subgenres as is common in e.g. rock music, where even a single subgenre like punk rock has many sub-subgenres like pop-punk, hardcore punk, art punk, crust punk, garage punk, riot grrrl, melodic punk, ska punk, synthpunk, grindcore, emocore, and so on.6 So if you find a piece of classical music you like (say, Pachelbel’s “Canon in D”), it’s difficult to find other similar pieces you might like.7
    3. On review sites for pop, rock, or hip-hop music, almost all reviewed releases are of new (not previously released) music, but on classical music review sites, almost all reviewed releases are cover albums (of compositions that have been recorded and released before), making it difficult for fans to track what’s actually new. This could be easily solved if classical music review sites used a special tag or section for premiere recordings, but they’ve chosen not to!
    4. Many of the most-recommended compositions are available in (a) multiple different arrangements (e.g. for solo piano vs. string quartet vs. orchestra), in (b) multiple different revisions (e.g. Beethoven’s Fidelio has three versions, Stravinsky’s The Firebird has four, and Bruckner’s 3rd symphony has six), and in (c) dozens or hundreds of different recordings, which vary in pacing and dynamics and other choices, in performance quality, and in recording quality. If someone recommends a rock album to you, just search the album name and click Play. But if you search the name of a classical piece that was recommended to you, often hundreds of versions will appear, and there’s rarely clear guidance on which version you should try first.
    5. Many compositions are listed using different titles depending on which source you check. For example, Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” is also frequently listed as “Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor,” “Piano Sonata Op. 27, No. 2,” “Sonata quasi una fantasia,” “Mondscheinsonate,” or “Sonate für Klavier cis-Moll.” Obviously, it’s hard to know at a glance that these six different phrases all refer to the same piece!
    6. Music streaming services will often fail to show you the piece you searched for, even if it’s in their catalog, because they were designed around the cataloguing conventions of pop music.

Even the ~least popular (and ~lowest-budget) rock, jazz, or hip-hop music is much more navigable and available than this.

Opera has its own special additional anti-consumer habits, some of them covered here.

  1. Lots of classical music has features most listeners don’t like, e.g. dissonance, wild complexity, sudden volume changes, bombastic/pretentious vocals (think of opera), and lots of time on what sounds like “aimless wandering” (music nerds call it “musical development”). (For example, even the famously delightful “galloping” section of the William Tell Overture doesn’t start until over 8 minutes into the piece. Or to take a more obscure example: I think many listeners will enjoy the bombastic first 1.5 minutes of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 mvt 4, but then be bored by most of the rest of the 24-minute movement. I suspect very few people can identify and appreciate most musical development, e.g. the parts of a sonata.) Composers defend all this by writing essays like “Who Cares if You Listen?“ [↩]
  2. For example: (1) The most prominent classical composer in all of Africa (19% of world population) is Fela Sowande, who wrote hundreds of pieces for organ, chorus, orchestra, and more — only a handful of which have been recorded. (2) Xian Xinghai was the leading “founder” of Western classical music in China (17% of world population), and one of its most prominent composers. He wrote over 300 works for chorus, orchestra, chamber ensemble, and more, but again only a handful have been recorded. (3) This is not just a feature of classical composers outside Europe and North America. For example, Simon Sechter was one of the most prolific classical composers in history, he taught Bruckner and was praised by Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann, and yet only a handful of his pieces have been recorded. Or consider Ferdinand Hiller, who was close friends with Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt, Rossini, and Mendelssohn, and wrote hundreds of pieces across all genres, perhaps roughly 7% of which have been recorded. Similarly few surviving classical works have been recorded for many other significant Western composers, e.g. Ludwig Minkus (~15%), Don Davis (~25%), Nicola Piovani (~15%), Nikolai Kapustin (~25%), or Dario Marianelli (~3%). Or consider perhaps the most popular modern classical composer, Ennio Morricone (>70 million records sold). He is best known for his film scores, but also composed numerous “classical” compositions, only a fraction of which have been recorded (~20%). [↩]
  3. Since performances near your home will happen rarely or never. Note that I’m not counting software-generated realizations for scores that were meant to be performed by musicians, since they are typically a poor substitute for a recording of human performers, at least using the technology available today — AI advances in the next few years might enable much more realistic automated “performances” of well-notated musical scores. [↩]
  4. Of course, this isn’t a “fair” comparison: there have been far more rock/pop artists in history than classical composers. Gemini 2.5 Deep Research estimated for me that “For Western classical composers, encompassing the tradition from its early roots through contemporary classical music, a plausible estimate is in the range of 50,000 to 75,000 individuals throughout history. For rock musical artists, including bands and solo performers from the genre’s inception to the present day, the number is likely in the low to mid-millions, potentially ranging from 2 million to 8 million or more distinct artist entities.” [↩]
  5. A great piece, but not accessible to beginners! [↩]
  6. Classical music is often organized by chronological period (e.g. baroque vs. classical vs. romantic), by instrument ensemble (e.g. solo piano vs. string quartet vs. piano trio vs. chamber orchestra vs. symphony orchestra), or by structure/form (e.g. canon vs. fugue vs. sonata vs. rondo vs. theme and variations), but those categorizations (especially the last two) are typically mostly unrelated to style in the sense of most rock / pop / hip-hop subgenres. There are some recognized style genres for classical music (e.g. arguably Mannheim School, Sturm und Drang, galant, Empfindsamkeit, impressionism, neoclassicism, or minimalism), but there are many fewer of these in common use than for rock music, and most classical music books and websites don’t reliably use them to categorize compositions or recordings. [↩]
  7. See also here. [↩]