This just occured to me. Classical music purists insist that classical music is valuable precisely because it isn’t popular.
Which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You define classical music as not popular, and its look and feel starts to reflect that. People — no fools they — start to get the message, and classical music actually becomes unpopular. People stop listening to it.
And so the purists get their wish, though not quite in the way they expected. They hadn’t figured that if classical music wasn’t popular, it might disappear.