A "major" factor? Blimey!  

The throne of England itself has been occupied by at least two composers, as any fule kno.

I'm half-listening to Shots from the Hip on Radio 4 (I'm really working, honest!) and it's just occurred to me how rash it is to assume ones own memory is reliable - and how much rasher it is just to take the word of historians/journalists who might have an inflated sense of the importance of their own ideas.  They just interviewed a journalist (Caroline Coon?) who was reminiscing about being in at the start of the Pistols' career.  She seemed to be arguing that having a name like "The Sex Pistols' represented unprecedented audacity in 1975; but as a music journalist she must have been aware of Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes who not only had been around for some time but had at least one major hit in the year the Pistols were formed. 

I'm curious about this notion that "classical" music was primarily written for and on behalf of the rich and powerful, and are still perceived as such.  The same is true for the visual arts - and while later styles and possibly more democratic styles (impressionist onward) are arguably more popular than earlier things, no one would glaze over or call you a snob/elitist if you say you went to the Uffizi on your holiday, or that you visit the National Gallery regularly.  Museums were designed to bring artworks originally created for the private pleasure of the powerful to the people.  I think public concerts are the same.  Many are free or offer cheap tickets, and no one's actually conducting an entrance exam at the door.  So why do classical music novices decide to feel excluded from concerts, yet art novices feel able to wander into a museum and look around (or at least don't think it's a strange thing for others to do)?

Perhaps the same reason that some shoppers feel intimidated when considering going into high class fashion designers' shops? The aura of exclusivity seems a powerful force in classical concerts; I find this to be more the case in concerts in the bigger venues in London than in other major Western cities I have visited. But I would tie that in with the particular form of snobbery, aloofness, condescension, and sense of implicit superiority (and above all, pseudo-aristocratic disdain for anything that might be constructed as a more 'emotional' reaction to music) of the British upper middle classes, who often predominate there. It's all expressed through forms of dress, speech, body language and so on as well as more overtly. It doesn't seem to be so much the case in galleries, but on the other hand there isn't the same necessary investiture of time there.

Concerts of contemporary classical music can be the worst of all, though, when over 90% of the audience already know each other, most of them are professionally or otherwise involved in the business, and there's a strong sense (at least I find) that the events are about networking, or simply 'supporting one's team' (in the sense of one's own inner group).

The difference between music and food is that music has no purpose other than to be valued/liked etc, whereas food has an additional paraphrasable purpose of fuelling the body. It makes perfect sense to value a food highly for its objectively high nutritional value while not actually liking it. 

Yes, but there's far more to the cuisines I mention above than simply nutritional value, which could be obtained simply from a certain number of basic ingredients cooked quite simply. And is it not possible that listening to music (of all types, by no means necessarily or primarily classical) might at best open up people's minds to different sensibilities, different cultures, different modes of communication, different aesthetics, different varieties of emotional experience, and mightn't that be something good in itself (which is in no sense to imply that music necessarily does this, though it can, I believe)?

Caroline Coon's  knowledege the black pop of the day = zero?** I dint think they were called sex pistols in 75 did she say that? I spose it was the violent connotations of pistols in tandem with sex that was controversial.
If it was her she called punk the hippies revenge or something which it did become partly, though wasn't in its proto state. A lot of the kids at the gigs then thought woodstock was a dog or something.

 
** the odd thing about early punk is  along with art students al ot of the early fans would have known about joe tex, a lot of the kids who went to say, the global village were in the punk audience as well. The press moulded it into their own image NME  -hip misery. Sounds -yobbishness.  MM -hippies revenge.