Mark Allen Group – the publishing house behind many of the UK’s trade and consumer publications in the classical music, opera and music education world – announced today that Classical Music Magazine is shutting down after publication of its Spring 2026 edition.
The message sent to PRs and journalists was oblique, not making absolutely clear whether its website set up in 2020 would be shutting down as well. Though comments from its columnist Andrew Mellor suggest it’s almost certainly going the same way.
Mark Allen Group acquired Classical Music Magazine along with a range of other niche titles, including Music Teacher, Choir & Organ, International Piano, and others from Rhinegold Publishing in December 2018 for a figure believed to be under £500,000 (https://flashesandflames.com/2018/08/09/the-irresistible-rise-of-uks-mark-allen-group). Opera Now also acquired by Mark Allen Group remains safe.
The most recent accounts available for Mark Allen Holdings Limited, filed at Companies House in March 2025, document a rise in turnover from £66.1m to £69.5m, while operating profit dropped sharply from £9.1m to £6.2m.
The group’s strategy, outlined in the annual report, focuses on titles where publishing can be extended beyond digital and print into events and conferences. Classical Music Magazine is unlikely to provide that kind of opportunity. Circulation figures are not publicly available, but given that consumer-facing publication BBC Music Magazine reported an ABC circulation of around 26,000 in 2021, it seems likely that CM only garnered readership (when it was in print pre-2018) in the low thousands. In a portfolio increasingly focused on sectors that support conferences, data services, and high-value professional subscriptions, a small trade publication covering a relatively small, publicly funded industry looks less like a loss-leader and more like an anachronism.
Given that CM Magazine made quite the play about its shift to online back in 2020, this closure announcement looks less like a crisis decision than a piece of portfolio housekeeping ahead of homework-handing-in at the end of this month. Classical Music almost certainly costs very little to run. At the same time, it would have generated very little strategic value. There’s money to be made in property, travel retail and healthcare markets.
It would be easy to see this as a statement about classical music’s relevance or the plight of writers. It is instead a part of the ongoing recalibration of a musical genre and the groups that perform it. It’s also a reinforcement of the present-day truth that people, by and large, won’t pay directly for journalism. Opportunistic independent paywalled sites promise industry detail but deliver little additional information beyond that which is already easy to infer. They might succeed in securing a month-long subscription. They almost certainly run the risk of getting a cancellation 30 days later.
The irony is that the death of Classical Music Magazine means the only consistently updated site that returns value in terms of information is Norman Lebrecht’s. That’s a bitter pill to swallow.
