Not your grandma's Shostakovich: How classical music is attracting younger audiences

It's the headline violinists, bassoonists and bangers of big expensive drums look for each year: classical music is back, and young people like it again.

To be fair, the data mostly checks out: According to a 2022 study from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO), people under 35 are actually more likely to listen to classical music than their parents. In a follow up report from early 2024, they reported interest in attending orchestral concerts peaked the previous year. They also found that orchestral music itself had a bigger increase in popularity than any other.

According to their report, more than half of classical audiences are newcomers to the space, with less than a third being longtime fans. 

But as an art form that goes back centuries instead of decades, it has more hurdles for attracting new fans than other resurgent trends. A perception by young people that it's an overly formal, inaccessible and stagnant form of music has threatened orchestras around the world, which, combined with shrinking post-COVID attendance, put classical music on the ropes.

Instead of trying to force the old world allure of classical into a modern era, it's done the opposite: using streaming, social media and a general dressing down of the dressy atmosphere of symphonies, classical musicians, educators and programmers are focusing on how new classical music can feel, and how modern it can become. 

Businesses seem to be dancing to this very tune. Apple has dumped money into the classical music space, acquiring rights to music from the Carnegie Hall, London Symphony Orchestra, Metropolitan Opera and more.

After buying and shutting down the niche classical streamer Primephonic, they touted their new Apple Music Classical app as being the biggest classical music streaming catalogue in the world on launch and have since expanded into Asia — betting big on Western classical music's culture-spanning allure to win market share from China's regionally dominant Tencent Music Entertainment. 

The Berliner Philharmoniker has recorded and broadcast all performances through its Digital Concert Hall for over 15 years. And though their claim as the "world's first streaming service." may be questionable, they did herald a trend. In the last five years, the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra — three of America's original "Big Five" orchestras — have experimented with their own streaming services. 

Of the remaining two, the Philadelphia Orchestra launched a streaming service in 2016, and the Cleveland Orchestra opted to partner with existing platform Idagio. It's a similar move to how London's Philharmonia Orchestra, the Salzburg Festival and the Hong Kong Philharmonic — and many, many others — have partnered with Apple Classical to get to digital audiences.

The response has been mixed: New Yorker writer Alex Ross criticized the platform's truncated playlists geared to commuters and young people short on time and attention span. He begrudgingly admitted the wealth of choice represented "a significant advance over the miseries of Apple Music and Spotify," though still paled in comparison to boutique classical streamers like Idagio and Presto.

It's a strategy that is also less likely to alienate existing fans: according to Luminate, baby-boomer fans of classical music are more likely than country or pop fans in the same age cohort to use streaming services. And according to that same 2024 RPO report, COVID-19 lockdowns "supercharged" the emerging trend of streaming classical music — a habit that has surprisingly maintained its prevalence even now that live performances have returned. 

"This helps to explain the resurgent interest in the genre," the report reads. "The heightened levels of discovery at home helped to fuel an interest in attending a concert."

But when it comes to those concert halls, programmers have needed to adapt as well — especially to hold the under-35 crowd. The stop-and-start, leisure viewing that streaming offers helps lower the barrier of entry to those used to more casual consumption habits, according to Andrew Bryan, lead of Canada's Candlelight Concerts.

"It just is not the way that we consume media," he said of traditional in-person classical concerts. "It's not the way that young people are used to consuming media."