It is 105 years since the Neapolitan tenor Enrico Caruso arrived at a Milanese hotel - the one in which Verdi had died the previous year - to make the first indisputably classic classical record. More than a century later, the performances Caruso committed to disc that morning in 1902 remain benchmarks. Luciano Pavarotti has called them the standard by which he and all subsequent tenors must measure themselves.

But for how much longer will this be true? A century on, fewer and fewer classical records are being made. Twenty years ago, the giant corporations that dominated the classical recording industry were turning out around 700 new releases every year. Today, just two are still in the business. Production is down to around 100 new discs a year - many in the crossover repertoire that purists would not accept as "classical" at all - and falling. If some new Caruso were to arise, his 22nd-century successors might struggle to discover how he sounded.

Over the past decade or so, this once vibrant and profitable production line - which shaped the performance styles of thousands of 20th-century musicians and the knowledge of millions of listeners - has been quietly sliding into oblivion. For all but a handful of stars, the days of the recording contract disappeared in the 1990s. The great companies have since merged, closed or abandoned classical altogether. With the emblematic closure of Tower Records in 2006, the great record stores are following suit.

Classical records might have gone the way of milk bottles and coal fires had it not been for the attentiveness of the cultural critic Norman Lebrecht, who has made it his life's work to demystify the classical music business. Every five years or so, Lebrecht produces a must-read, muck-raking book about some simultaneously heroic and horrific aspect of the industry. Now he has done it again: in Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness, Lebrecht pronounces the death of the classical recording industy. Occasionally slap-happy with his facts and never one for understatement, Lebrecht ends his new book with the categorical conclusion that an art form has come to an end.

But is this true? If it is, what went wrong? And what, in the broader sense, has been lost, both for musicians and for music lovers? If there is to be no more classical recording in the digital age, how do classical music and its public adjust?

The only dispute about classical recording is whether it is dying or dead. The glut that by the end of the 20th century had generated at least 276 recordings of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, and more than 435 recordings of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, has given way to a famine. Yes, EMI and the DG-Decca group continue to record, but at a reduced level, and for how much longer? Yes, the budget-price Naxos and a cluster of independent labels (and a few "own brands" such as the London Symphony Orchestra's LSO Live) are still producing. But, as Lebrecht recently argued in Prospect magazine, the "chain of interpretation" that was such an integral part of classical recording has now been ruptured.

What went wrong was partly the glut: with 435 versions available, who needs number 436? A by-product of the glut was the emergence of "the one to have"; a Beethoven 5th would have to be very special to be better than Carlos Kleiber's 1974 disc, so why look further? Classical recording companies became an increasingly exposed niche market for the multimillion-dollar global entertainment corporations that had acquired them. Because they generated little or no short-term profitability compared to pop, it is hardly surprising that the corporations lost their nerve, especially as the internet began to expand.

In retrospect, it was the Three Tenors' 1990 concert in Rome that marked the watershed. When the recording of that performance sold a staggering 14m copies, the industry went aggressively in search of other marketable middle-of-the-road packages. "Classical" was redefined as Charlotte Church, Vanessa-Mae and Andrea Bocelli. As Lebrecht points out, Katherine Jenkins, marketed as an operatic megastar, had never set foot on any operatic stage - yet for a time she outsold Maria Callas.

The result is the mainstream decline we are living in today. A handful of favoured serious artists continue to be able to make studio records, Simon Rattle and Christian Thielemann among them. In general, though, the days of orchestral studio recording have ended. Does any of this matter? Or are we simply living through one of those periodic eras of uncomfortable change that will, in time, resolve itself into a new era of public appetite for artistic excellence in a different, perhaps as yet unknown, form? Human history suggests the answer is yes. The need to produce and the wish to consume have found ways in the past - and so they will do in the future. But there are at least three reasons to be less sanguine.

The first is the decline of classical music itself. The Russian pianist and conductor Mikhail Pletnev says simply that classical music finished in the mid-20th century. Remarks such as this always bring yelps of indignation from modernists and specialists, yet such howls are not a counter-argument. Many of the lions of the recording age grew up with composers who have been staples of the recorded reportoire. Caruso sang in Puccini premieres. Horowitz played Rachmaninov to the composer. Richter and Rostropovich played works dedicated to them by Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Today, the repertoire continues to expand, but not at such a level. Connections of such richness no longer exist. The bankruptcy of postwar modernism created a public musical vacuum into which Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Bob Dylan strode, with lasting consequences for classical music. Unless and until the genre reinvents itself as a living art form for the public, the industry is doomed to be backward-looking in ways that it was not in the time of Britten and Stravinsky.

The second is the difficulty of restoring the ruptured interpretative tradition. Just as tenors measured themselves against Caruso and pianists against Schnabel, so, ever since Arthur Nikisch recorded Beethoven's 5th on the eve of the first world war, conductors have had benchmarks, too. Until Nikisch, the art of interpretation was wholly subjective. After Nikisch, it gradually became more objective. Under Toscanini in the 1940s and Karajan in the 1970s, hubris set in, in the form of the search for the "definitive" performance. But the process generated quality as well as quantity; recording fed a virtuous circle of creative interpretation that brought music to millions in all parts of the world.

The final problem is the technology. It is too easy to say the internet will fill the gap. There is no guarantee of this. As Lebrecht points out, the quality both of performance and audio on the internet is still generally inferior. The iTunes bit rate is less than one tenth that of a classical CD, while even hi-tech downloads are below CD standard.

Only a fool would deny that this subject is riddled with the danger of nostalgia. But only a fool would deny that change can bring loss as well as, perhaps, gain. The recorded era fostered unprecedented levels of literacy and popularity for classical music. The means of exchange for this wholly beneficial and desirable process was the recording. Now that means of exchange is on the verge of disappearing altogether. You would have to be very brave indeed to argue that civilisation is the gainer, not the loser.

Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness: the Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Record Industry by Norman Lebrecht is published by Penguin on Thursday

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