Musicians decry classical music used to drive young people away

Classical music has become an unlikely tool of crowd control, and that is exactly why musicians are angry. What rail operators and shop staff present as a low-contact answer to anti-social behaviour looks, to critics, like a coded message that certain young people do not belong in public space.

The tactic has a long history in Britain. London Underground extended a scheme in January 2005 to play classical music at 40 Tube stations to deter what it called yobbish behaviour. In Worthing, West Sussex, police used the same approach after more than 60 teenagers gathered at a bandstand on one night, while a Co-op in Northern Ireland found classical tracks were the most effective way to move youths on. Northern said in 2024 that it would keep playing classical music at stations because it had been an effective deterrent to anti-social behaviour.

That history matters because the debate is not really about Beethoven or Strauss. It is about who gets to shape the atmosphere of streets, platforms and shopfronts, and which kinds of young people are treated as a nuisance to be managed. Musicians and industry groups have argued for years that classical music should stand for access, diversity and inclusion, not exclusion, and the Musicians' Union has warned that inequalities in the classical sector risk shrinking the talent pool and reducing diversity. Against that backdrop, using the genre to drive teenagers away can sound less like neutral behaviour management than a class cue.

The same logic has driven other anti-loitering tactics. BBC reporting in 2008 said there were an estimated 3,500 Mosquito devices in use in England, and the Parliament of the United Kingdom later recorded that the Council of Europe found the high-pitched devices degrading and discriminatory to youngsters and recommended that they be banned. The complaint then, as now, was that such devices and sounds do not simply disperse crowds. They signal which age groups are welcome and which are not.

Authorities have continued to reach for visible deterrents. In April 2026, police in Clapham, south London, authorised a dispersal order after large crowds of youths gathered, and two teenage girls were arrested on suspicion of assaulting an emergency worker. That kind of incident helps explain why officials reach for quick answers. It also explains why musicians hear a deeper message in the soundtrack: that taste itself is being weaponised as a form of soft policing.