High dropout rate in school music was a pressing issue highlighted in the recent national review of school music in Australia. However, our current knowledge on the issue of declining participation in school music is rather limited. In response, the current study took a student perspective and explored whether they would continue or discontinue their extracurricular music learning if they were given a choice. Another concern of this study was to understand the motivational characteristics of those who intended to continue or discontinue extracurricular music learning. Using a survey design, the current study involved 210 Year 7 primary school students drawing from various Brisbane State schools. These participants completed a questionnaire assessing their achievement goals, self-efficacy, enjoyment, and perceived parental and peer support, perceived relevance of music learning and their intention to continue or discontinue learning music. MANOVA analyses were conducted to explore the differences between the continuing and discontinuing students in extracurricular music. It was found that these two groups of students differed in their achievement goals, learning beliefs, parental support and time spent on practice. A further analysis using clustering procedure found three groups of students with contrasting motivational profiles: mastery-oriented, multiple-goal oriented and disoriented students. Mastery and multiple-goal students had higher scores on self-efficacy, enjoyment, perceived parental support but lower scores in perceived irrelevance of music learning than did the disoriented students. A Chi-square test confirmed that the disoriented group was overpopulated by students who intended to quit extracurricular music learning.