Music education won’t save classical music

An empty concert hall in the dark, viewed from the stage looking out at the empt seats

There is a phrase that we hear over and over again in our industry. Something that we come back to whenever we face hardship, when audiences decline, or even when we have an opportunity to share a message with the masses.

“Music education will save classical music”.

A narrative that the problems we face in the concert hall are due to cuts in music education, and that more funding in music education is what is required to build future audiences. “How else will young people come to classical concerts if they aren’t exposed to it at school and educated in it?”

The thing is… music education will not save classical music.

Now, before you start writing angry tweets, bear with me for a second. My entire background is from participating in and working in music education. The only reason I am where I am today is because of the music education I received as a young person, and from creating and running an award-winning music education organisation. I have seen first-hand the incredible good it does and I am a firm believer that we should invest in music education for on these merits alone.

However, saying that “investing in music education will save classical music and boost audiences” is a convenient lie we tell ourselves, to absolve us of the blame and responsibility for the drop in audiences and prevent us from the difficult task of reflecting on what we have to do better.

This narrative suggests two things:

Education is directly related to the consumption of art
Cutting music education funding means that fewer young people are interested in classical music

So, let’s look at the first. Yes, we are seeing cuts in funding to music education, but classical music education continues to be invested in significantly higher than other music genres. If you drive past a school, you will see students carrying violins, tubas, flutes, cellos, and all manner of classical instruments. But you won’t see some poor kid dragging along a set of turntables to school. I don’t think there is a person alive who has said “I’m not really into Electronic Dance Music, and that’s probably because I didn’t have access to DJ lessons as a child”.

EDM, Dubstep, Grime, and Hip-Hop have all thrived over the years despite there being no formalised music education. The significant majority of people who enjoy pop and rock music won’t have come to enjoy it through music education. If music education was tied to music consumption, surely these genres would be struggling to find an audience? Millions of people across the world enjoy different genres of music, including classical, without having been exposed to them through music education.

The previous narrative also suggests that you need to be educated in an art form to enjoy an art form. Most people have no education about the world of cinema, and yet millions across the world enjoy films. Art galleries are full of people who are coming to paintings and sculptures with no training or knowledge. You don’t need to know what the different positions are to enjoy ballet. Even in sports, you don’t need to know the rules, let alone the complex strategies, to enjoy a game.

It is counterproductive, elitist, and dangerous for us to keep shouting about how we need music education to save classical music audiences as it reinforces the idea that you need to be educated in it to enjoy it, and if you are not then classical music is not for you.

But this cut in music education funding has meant that fewer young people are interested in classical music right? Well, this is the part of the blog where we can get excited…

Over the last 5 years, there has been study after study, and article after article, about how classical music is increasing in popularity with young people. I could share tons of examples, but here are just some selected highlights:

2019 – Independent - Classical music is experiencing a huge resurgence – and it’s all thanks to millennial streaming
2020 – Classic FM - Research shows huge surge in Millennials and Gen Zers streaming classical music
2023 – The Telegraph - Classical music strikes a chord with Gen Zers

This excerpt from a 2022 BBC article sums things up perfectly:

“A survey published in December 2022 by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) found that 74% of UK residents aged under 25 were likely to be tuning into [orchestral music] at Christmas-time, compared with a mere 46% of people aged 55 or more.

These figures reflect not only the RPO's broader finding that under 35-year-olds are more likely to listen to orchestral music than their parents, but also the widespread surge in popularity of classical music in general, particularly among younger generations.”

Despite the cuts in music education, it turns out that interest in classical music among young people is not only growing, but it is surpassing that of our traditional audience base. And this is all happening organically without us doing anything!

We are in an incredibly lucky situation where we have a new customer base emerging and growing completely independently. The problem with our declining audiences isn’t due to a lack of music education, it’s due to our refusal to adapt our product and how we market to connect to a new and growing audience.

Think about what this would be like in another industry. If that industry was struggling with sales to its traditional customer base, and out of the blue a new customer base suddenly appeared and was growing all by itself, do you think the companies in that industry would pivot? Damn right they would!

We’ve seen this happen a lot in the fashion world, with brands like Burberry and Louis Vuitton. Old Spice shook off its old uncool image and targeted young people with a completely reinvented brand. Marvel moved away from its traditional print audience into films and television to connect to a whole new audience.

All of the businesses above worked hard to target and make new audiences interested in their product. Unlike them, we have the incredible luck to have a new audience becoming interested in what we could offer totally organically. Not only that, but it’s the demographic we keep saying we want to target, to include in our concert halls, and that is vital for our survival. Despite this, we keep making decisions that focus on what appeals to old shrinking audiences and not new growing audiences.

A version of the distracted boyfriend meme, where a man a labelled as orchestras looks at a woman labeled as "old shrinking audiences", while his girlfriend labelled "new growing audiences" is ignored

There is one rule for the long-term success of a business: adapt or die. The only thing that will “save classical music” is change. We need to change our product and how we market it to be appropriate to the world we live in. Adapt or die.

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