Roll Over, Geri Halliwell

He may have been dead for 178 years, but the greatest of all composers, Ludwig van Beethoven, has I suspect done our state some service this year. With the help of the BBC and its Philharmonic, he may just have rolled back a malign equation that at the time of Live8 seemed all but irreversible: music = pop + rock. Increasingly over the years the definition of music has settled in this territory. "Music-wise, I've got very eclectic tastes - I go from Kiss FM to IXtra, everything really" - Rageh Omaar, in the My Media slot in Monday's Guardian. Eclectic? Maybe. Everything? I don't think so.

Were it not part of London, Croydon would be one of Britain's big cities. It's a town of nearly 300,000 people - almost the size of Coventry, and bigger than Nottingham - with a concert hall and a resident orchestra. Until two or three years ago, Croydon had a record shop called L&H Cloake. Pop, rock and their various relations occupied the ground floor, but those able to climb the stairs could find a good range of classical music.

My test of an adequate record shop would be this: could you on a Friday morning wander in on an impulse and hope to find a recording to which Andrew Clements had just awarded five stars? L&H Cloake just about met that requirement. But L&H Cloake has gone, replaced by a music store that largely subscribes to the rule that music is pop and rock. An entrepreneur who sought to fill the gap by opening up a classical record store round the corner closed it down after just a few weeks.

But this, you might reply if you were Croydon, is a case of a pot insulting a kettle. The neglect of classical music, as opposed to the big money kind, is evident in newspapers too, even the serious ones. A conspicuous case, it has to be said (even at the risk of offending the Guardian's sister paper), is the publication that calls itself the Observer Music Monthly. "It seems," says its editor in the July edition, analysing an ICM poll on what Britain is listening to, "that 51% of us can identify a picture of Geri Halliwell whereas only 6% recognise Sir Edward Elgar". I don't think that these figures tell us all that much about musical taste. Partly they reflect the fact that the papers are often full of pictures of Geri Halliwell, whereas Elgar with his morose moustache features only sporadically.

But let us examine this in the context of the magazine's regular feature Review, which is subtitled: your guide to music in all its forms. All its forms? You might think room could be found under this rubric for the art form that gave us Bach and Handel, Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn, Schubert and Brahms, Wagner and Verdi ... and, yes, even that sadly sub-Halliwell figure, Elgar.

But there's nothing like that in the OMM top 10, which takes in Kanye West and Goldfrapp and Lethal Bizzle (there's a reference to the Kronos Quartet, but they're involved in a disc of Bollywood soundtracks); nor, assuming that Charlotte Church's Tissues and Issues doesn't include the odd track from Elgar's Sea Pictures, in the next 10 either. Even the 43 runners-up include only one exercise in classical music: the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra under Barenboim playing Tchaikovsky's Fifth. A bad month for the classics perhaps? But the May and June editions tell much the same story.

That, one might wearily have concluded until Beethoven intervened, is the way of the world. There's a vast and insatiable passion for popular music: classical music, by contrast, is a cloistered affair, the taste of a very few. And yet here, in a piece by Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian a week ago, is evidence that does not fit this picture at all. "Forget Coldplay and James Blunt," Higgins wrote. "Forget even Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which in the version performed at Live8 by Sir Paul McCartney and U2 has become the fastest online-selling song ever. Beethoven has routed the lot of them."

After its epic Beethoven week in June, the BBC made available for downloading all nine of his symphonies as performed by the BBC Phil under Noseda. The full works were downloaded 1.4m times, with individual symphonies attracting a further 89,000 to 220,000 customers. That suggests a far greater hunger for classical music out there, even among the young, than is dreamt of in the philosophies of the Observer Music Monthly. The continuing pull of the Proms, of which not all the audiences look like pensioners, underlines that.

No doubt fewer people can recognise a portrait of Beethoven than could do the same when shown Victoria Beckham, while Haydn fares pretty sadly in the identification stakes compared with Jade Goody. But perhaps, might I dare to suggest, that isn't the point.