Eh... As a moderately frequent concertgoer, I don&#x27;t recognise much of this. Possibly regionally specific, but in London, a ticket to a big-ticket repertoire symphony with the LSO or whatever can be had for about £10, and a pretty nice seat for £25-30, which is about what I paid to see Nile and Suffocation, surely more niche than Mahler, and probably half what you need to see a big pop act. (Opera is eye-gougingly expensive, though.) The orchestra dresses formally, the audience doesn&#x27;t (unless they want to). Silence between movements is observed, however, which sort of freaks me out.<p>I&#x27;m ambivalent about the video game music thing, simply because what works in one setting doesn&#x27;t necessarily work in another. A game score&#x27;s primary virtue is to withstand repetition and respond to non-deterministic events (which may be a more interesting way to approach a VGM concert than just a tour of Final Fantasy&#x27;s &#x27;greatest hits&#x27; or whatever; certainly there are precedents in the post-war avant garde for that kind of thing). A symphony proper is designed ground-up for the sort of setting in which you are likely to hear it - an acoustically-tuned concert hall, with a highly-trained band of musicians extracting every bit of dynamic range and expressive potential out of their instruments. There&#x27;s nothing quite like it when it works (there is also nothing quite like, since I&#x27;ve mentioned it, death metal, or techno, or ...)<p>The problem with &#x27;high-culture&#x27; institutions going for populism is that it can be done in a really shallow, instrumentalist way: the VGM concert as the loss leader for Schoenberg frankly isn&#x27;t going to do any favours to the VGM. It has to be treated seriously, or it won&#x27;t even be fun - not used as a gateway drug for what the orchestra&#x2F;concert hall <i>really</i> wants you to listen to.