One of the common complaints in the classical world about the rise of digital is that DSPs were set up to primarily deal with pop music – offering downloads and streams of tracks that normally run to just over three minutes. The long-form nature of classical means that symphonies and operas could run for several hours and had to be listened to from start to finish. Chopping up these elaborate pieces into “digestible” chunks or jumbling them up in playlists often misses the point and risks trivialising them. 

The other thing causing the classical world some grief here was the sound issue – with compression technologies upsetting audiophiles who felt the great, dramatic roar of an orchestra was badly dampened in the digital realm. Specialist services like Idagio and Primephonic were set up specifically to address these issues and the other generalist DSPs are making encouraging movements here. 

Given all of these concerns one might imagine the classical world collapsing on its fainting couch at the rise of TikTok – a whole new world where everything is compressed down to mere seconds and where the sonics are never as important as the visuals. And yet many in the classical world increasingly see TikTok as an important way to reach new audiences, especially younger consumers, so they have adapted to the peculiar rhythms of the medium.