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Comment by seba_dos1

5 hours ago

> so it doesn't have to stand on its own two feet. So they don't (have to) care about listeners as much.

That's great. A lot is lost when art has to cater to audiences.

Except it runs into an excess problem. As an example, Berlin - just one city - has 7 professional orchestras. They are supported by the government financially to the tune of 200 million EUR per year. There is a very real opportunity cost here and quite a bit of a wealth transfer to old people at the same time (since the audiences for classical music tend to be on the older side).

You could pump a large part of those resources into supporting other kinds of music and arguably the outcome would be more interesting.