It’s an advertisement that males will recall all too easily: thousands of bikini-clad women scrambling through jungle and water to converge on the beach, all drawn to a single man, who happens to be using Lynx deodorant. But, if you listen, the backing music happens to be classical, part of a requiem by Karl Jenkins, the Welsh composer.

Classical music may not command the column inches of Amy Winehouse or U2, but it is, at least, not in decline, helped by a generally honest customer base who do not download operas illegally, and by its growing use in advertising. Boosey & Hawkes, Jenkins’s publisher, will produce profits of about £7.8 million this year, up 11 per cent, with net royalty income up 10 per cent at £14.5 million, according to John Minch, its chief executive.

Boosey, the most famous name in classical music, owns rights to about “200,000 works, of which 100 get played all the time, and another 100 get played once or twice”, Mr Minch says. Once a work is part of the canon, it represents a steady stream of income. “The best-played work might generate £400,000 in a year, but the average is much lower,” Mr Minch says. “Even a relatively popular piece might only generate £3,000.” Active composers typically earn between £20,000 and £50,000 from royalties.

Individually that is modest, but it adds up. Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev and Benjamin Britten are all part of the Boosey library – although Mr Minch notes it has taken time for even their works to generate money. “Shostakovich and Britten both died in the 1970s, and only now is their work widely played,” he said. Typically it takes at least a decade for a successful work to establish itself; after that, royalties hardly change. “Income from, say, Sergei Rachmaninov, is just about the same every year; in a good year it might go up 10 per cent.”

It helps that classical music is unfashionable, and so there is little competition from the music majors. A typical composer splits royalty income on a 50-50 basis with Boosey & Hawkes, while a pop artist would want an advance and 80 per cent of the spoils on the normal five-year deal. “If we signed Damon Albarn, for his Monkey opera, we’d probably have to pay him £1 million up front,” Mr Minch says.

That kind of low risk is what helped to persuade APG, the Dutch public sector pension fund, to buy Boosey for £126 million from HgCapital, the private equity firm, in April. Boosey’s library represents steady income – and APG is able to pay little tax under Dutch law, and so could outbid rivals.

“Composers often talk about their royalties as their pension, so perhaps it is fitting we are owned by a pension fund,” Mr Minch says. Certainly, amid collapsing asset prices, Shostakovich seems a safe bet. APG is interested in backing Boosey to do more deals – it is one of several suitors chasing the $200 million (£136 million) Rodgers and Hammerstein catalogue, although Mr Minch won’t talk about that.

The challenge, though, is to ensure that new works make it into the canon, or at least, make more money. Three quarters of turnover still comes from performance royalties. In a concert, 4 per cent of the gross goes to the composer – running to 12 per cent for an opera. “Lots of great work gets played just once; one of our jobs is to ensure that a new opera like John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, first performed in San Francisco, is played again. Three weeks ago it was on at the Met in New York,” says Mr Minch.

The growth that has been achieved has come from advertisers, such as Lynx. Advertisement music generates a tenth of turnover on a business that did not exist for Boosey a decade ago. Not all composers like to be linked with advertising, because of the risk that the music can become tied to a brand. Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knightshas lost some lustre, because it is the theme tune for The Apprentice, and too closely associated with Sir Alan Sugar’s show. However, if that is the worst that can happen, then compared with the rest of the music business, classical has it easy.

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