Classical music is not a glamorous industry. The pay is generally shit and almost always requires vigorous chasing. The people behind it are for the most part stuck in the 1930s and constitutionally incapable of connecting in any way with those born after 1960. The industry has been divided into sharks on the one hand (anything for a buck, even if it involves bastardising the music to an unrecognisable degree) and the "purebloods" on the other - the Aryan race of the music world where this music is reserved for those who are intelligent and rarefied enough to understand it.

Meanwhile, the presentation and pomp behind it is antiquated, offensive, shrouded in self-importance and irrelevant. But, rather than try and change things, like a chubby, entitled, picked-upon child it looks in all the wrong places to boost its self-esteem. Award ceremonies for the classical industry (industry, not listeners) must have sounded such a terrific idea on paper. Sadly, the mutual masturbatory back-slapping and sense of "better than" that is so rife amongst those who claim to enjoy Varèse and Xenakis only serves to provide the perfect means to further separate what is truly important about classical music from what is deemed as oxygen to those behind it.

The Gramophone Awards are a case in point. First and foremost they need to be congratulated, hugely congratulated, for providing a counterpoint to the Classic Brit awards. I'm not even going to merit the Classic Brits with column inches other than to say I would rather commit to a career in clown porn than support them, and let you know that this year, alongside Alfie Boe and Katharine Jenkins, Richard Clayderman's album Romantique (seriously) is nominated for Album of the Year. And that it includes a Les Miserables medley and his own, inimitable transcription of You Raise Me Up. I wrote more about last year's ceremony here, but suffice to say, for those wanting to learn about classical music you would be better off sticking spikes in your ears and necking meths.

Back to the Gramophone Awards. I love Gramophone Magazine. I am a subscriber and inevitably spend at least £50 every month on CDs after reading their recommendations. In much the same way as someone devoted to trains would go nuts at a Hornby store while clutching his (pristine) copy of Heritage Railway Magazine, I get off on reading about the latest Rachmaninov recording from (yet) another genius Russian pianist. It is Heat magazine for socially awkward classical music fans and nothing more. On the scale of worldly importance it ranks somewhere between peanut butter and Andrex moist wipes - it's rather lovely but by no means essential.

Unlike the vile Brits, the Gramophones honour bona fide core-classical musicians – Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Steven Osborne, Antonio Pappano and others all won much-deserved awards this year. This is a great thing. If Osborne, Pappano et al were footballers they would be household names. But they're not. And, for all the ceremony and spiel, this industry is doing less than nothing to give them the status and recognition they deserve. There was no laughter beyond the occasional inside joke, awkwardly scripted, uptight acceptance speeches, not even the merest hint of inclusion for those who exist outside the classical music world. This was yet another awards ceremony about Self. Self-congratulation, self-celebration, self-importance, where music is kept as the property of a few individuals and yet another wall is erected between music and public. You would get more of a buzz watching a House of Commons webcam than watching last night's award ceremony, even if by some miracle it were televised.

The problem with classical music is that the whole industry is so deeply ashamed of itself, so unremittingly apologetic for being involved with an art form seen as irrelevant, privileged and poncey, that it has gone to unfortunate extremes to over-compensate. Classical, as a genre, has become the musical equivalent of cranking (look it up). And if it didn't break my heart quite so much, I'd simply laugh and get back to practising my little upright piano. But the legacy it is leaving us and the price we all will pay for this is too distressing to ignore.

EM Forster wrote that a Beethoven symphony was "the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated the ear of man". Goethe called architecture "frozen music". Classical music has been around for centuries because it has an unceasing, infallible and soul-shattering ability to take all of us on a journey of self-discovery and improvement in a world where most other means of doing so seem to involve either Simon Cowell or Deepak Chopra. It is a right, not a luxury, and, at the risk of sounding like a haughty middle-class mother at a children's birthday party, the industry behind it is ruining it for the rest of us.

The impotent bleating about reaching younger audiences, the evident pride Classic FM takes in playing a 12-minute-long piece of music ("our big piece after 6pm"), the endless movie themed "classical" shows on radio, the total and utter segregation of classical music on TV, radio and press, the inevitable Halls of Fame, compilation best of box-sets, Tchaikovsky 1812 overtures - with cannon and mortar effects (war veterans stay away) all chip away relentlessly at the underlying fabric of what makes classical music so infinite and great.

Last night, despite an irritatingly brilliant performance from Benjamin Grosvenor (he really is as good as they say) and a Lifetime Achievement acceptance speech that showed Julian Bream to be a total dude and refreshingly human in an otherwise stultifying vacuum, was just more pomp and pointlessness. Universally white (save for the waiting staff), nettle cordial and lamb on the tables for the smartphone-addicted guests, piped classical music (seriously - if the Gramophone Awards are happy to pump it out at barely audible levels then what hope is there?), and the air of ennui so thick you could choke on it.

If our politicians are going to continue to cut arts funding and appear answerable to no one, then surely it is up to the industry itself to stamp its feet and make some changes. Christ, Beethoven was so horrified at the treatment of classical musicians and composers he put an immediate stop to being treated like a servant - he kicked down the doors, planted bombs under his audience's seats and unapologetically claimed his place as the man who heralded in the Romantic age. Today, we spend a few quid getting industry insiders drunk on dodgy wine in a cold, dark room for four long hours.

No matter how much I worship Steven Osborne, Zoltan Kocsis and the other stellar Gramophone Award winners from 2013, nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed for the better in either the perception of classical music or the prognosis for it after last night's ceremony. I wish I'd stayed at home listening to Glenn Gould.

* Follow James Rhodes on twitter at @JRhodesPianist

See also

Gramophone's Martin Culilingford on why James Rhodes has missed the point about awards ceremonies