Since their appearance in the mid-nineteenth century, program notes, sometimes containing detailed information on the works that are to be performed, have continued to meet a wide range of audiences needs during concerts, such as: providing intelligible tools for laymen and laywomen to decipher while arousing the curiosity of well-informed listeners. In the age of Internet and Social media, these music appreciation tools, which fall within what we may call “practical” musicology, are evolving more than ever. They offer significant improvement in terms of audio and visual content, but raise some questions concerning the actual role that symphonic orchestras in particular are willing to see them play. In this article we will try to respond to this new reality through a series of concrete examples of music appreciation tools, including some which were produced in the context of a project we conducted in partnership with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal.