“As Norma Desmond might have remarked, classical music didn’t get small — the media world that it’s trying to be part of got real, real big.” In a two-part series, the Chronicle examines why the business of classical music is not growing, though it still has an active audience. Compared to the world of pop music, classical is small potatoes, and companies are no longer willing to wait for the long term return on slow, but steady, album sales. Online businesses are hoping to grow into this market, but they’ll need paying subscribers and advertisers.

The article mentions in passing that classical radio stations “are tweaking their formats to try to reach larger audiences.” The two stations I’ve listened to are playing shorter parts of longer pieces and putting the more popular tunes on heavy rotation. With the vast catalog of classical recordings and many unrecognized B+/A- composers, as my conductor likes to call them (he teaches), this is unfortunate. One doesn’t need William Tell all the time, nor the same Holst planet played every day. My husband owns a 200 disk CD changer and we are considering filling it with all our classical albums and using that instead of the radio. After a few days of listening to cropped popular symphonies on our classical station, it seems it can’t be that much worse. But if this format gets more people to support classical music, I will not complain.