The article examines the aesthetic education of adolescents in the system of additional music education as a pedagogical mechanism for forming artistic taste and restructuring the value-semantic sphere of the individual amid digitalization and the dominance of mass culture, which erodes criteria of artistic value and reinforces orientation toward simplified cultural samples. The theoretical framework is based on the understanding of artistic taste as a dynamic, purposefully formed quality associated with the development of emotional responsiveness, empathy, reflection, and the ability to culturally-historically comprehend artistic texts; it emphasizes the limitations of formalized approaches that reduce taste education to assimilating information about styles and genres without incorporating personal experience. The results of a five-year longitudinal study conducted in additional education institutions across three federal districts involving 620 students aged 12-17 and 225 teachers are presented; diagnostic procedures combined value ranking (adapted toolkit based on the approach to terminal and instrumental values), a music preferences questionnaire with listening to fragments from Baroque to popular music, participant observation, analysis of creative products (essays, compositions, interpretations), and expert assessments, as well as correlation, factor analysis, and difference testing. A pronounced shift in genre preferences was recorded among those systematically engaged in music: the share of orientation toward academic music and intellectual directions is substantially higher than among peers outside music training, with a simultaneous decrease in the dominance of mass pop-culture. Statistically significant connections were identified between the duration of music training and parameters of emotional development (increase in empathy, improvement in emotion identification, reduction in anxiety and aggressiveness, particularly high indicator of aesthetic empathy). It is shown that in the value hierarchy of music students, the positions of «beauty», «creativity» and «cognition» rise while priorities of «entertainment» and material security weaken; the integrative assessment demonstrates a reduction in the share of low artistic taste level and significant growth of the creative-analytical level, interpreted as the formation of stable selectivity and «immunity» to the primitivization of cultural consumption.