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Atonal music has a big audience. Go to festivals like Donaueschingen, but buy your tickets half a year in advance, because it will be booked out very quickly. I've been to much smaller and less popular concerts/festivals than that and have often had a hard time getting a seat, and that in large concert halls. And I assure you, you won't find any traditionally tonal music in Donaueschingen.
And if a composer like Hans-Werner Henze (a serialist, mind you, even though a "moderate" one) premieres a new opera, there are sold-out opera houses and standing ovations. (Check out the reviews for Phaedra.)
The audience only seems so small because we are comparing it with the audiences other kinds of music have. But keep in mind that people have never listened so much to music as in the 20th/21th centuries. Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were (somewhat) successful, but their audiences weren't huge by today's standards.
There are quite a few "atonal" composers of today who easily have an audience as large as those composers of the past had in their lifetime.
I don't like the term "atonal" too much though, as there's no good way to define it and there are many so-called "atonal" works that certainly have a clear tonality, just not 19th century one made of major and minor keys etc.
But it's almost ridiculous to think the music you probably call atonal has "nothing more to offer". Non-tonality is the general case, CPP tonality is a specific system. Saying that -not- using a very specific method (in contrast to the more general case) is worn out, is saying that CPP tonality is the ultimate and perfect system, the epitome of art with which nothing can possibly compete. Sounds quite narrow-minded to me. Art is always changing, eveloping, branching out. It's natural that at some point you reach something that can no longer be described with the musical terms of the European 19th century. It doesn't matter if this new thing sounds like Schönberg or completely different. But I find the thought quite terrifying that we might have found a "solution" in music, a "perfect system" in which we can happily stay for all eternity. Again, atonality (a bit depending on your definitions of course) is no style or system, simply the absence of a system.
No, what you call "atonality" isn't dead.
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