{"id":80839,"date":"2023-03-21T05:00:03","date_gmt":"2023-03-21T09:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=80839"},"modified":"2023-03-20T15:46:51","modified_gmt":"2023-03-20T19:46:51","slug":"the-musical-anomaly-that-was-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2023\/03\/21\/the-musical-anomaly-that-was-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"The musical anomaly that was 2022 – when classical music suddenly became much more popular"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ted Gioia<\/a> looks at some surprising numbers for the music industry showing that of all genres, classical music suddenly became much more popular in 2022:<\/p>\n

Last year, I went viral with an article about the rising popularity of old music<\/a>. But I focused on old rock songs. Many of these songs are 40 or 50 years old. And in the world of pop culture, that’s like ancient history.<\/p>\n

But if you really want old music, you can dig back 200 or 300 years \u2014 or even more, if you want. But does anybody really do that?<\/p>\n

Conventional wisdom tells us that only around 1% of the public cares about classical music. And it doesn’t change much from year to year.<\/p>\n

For proof, just take a look at this chart:<\/p>\n

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If you love concerts at the philharmonic, you read these figures with much weeping and gnashing of teeth. If classical music were any smaller, it would be a rounding error. Or \u2014 even sadder \u2014 it would be like jazz.<\/p>\n

But that data only covers the period up to 2021. And 2022 was different.<\/p>\n

In fact, it was remarkably different. <\/p>\n

Over the last 12 months, I\u2019ve started to see surprising signs of a larger audience turning to classical music. Last year, I wrote about the amazing saga of WDAV, the first classical music radio station in US history to take the top spot in its city<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I analyzed the numbers, and tried to get to the bottom of this unexpected success story. At the time, I wrote:<\/p>\n