As part of BBC Radio 3's recent homage to Beethoven, the corporation made all the composer's symphonies freely available to downloaders. You could go and stick the stormy German's complete works (as played by the BBC Philharmonic) onto your iPod and it wouldn't cost you a penny.
Unsurprisingly, it was phenomenally successful. As the Guardian's report this morning pointed out:
Final figures from the BBC show that the complete Beethoven symphonies on its website were downloaded 1.4m times, with individual works downloaded between 89,000 and 220,000 times. The works were each available for a week, in two tranches, in June.
Apparently, this places Ludwig way ahead of his online rivals. After all, the Live 8 version of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, one of the most popular downloads ever, has sold a mere 20,000 tracks in a fortnight - something which "contrasts poorly with the admittedly free Beethoven symphonies".
But there's the rub: the Beeb's Beethoven cost nothing. Is this really comparing like for like?
The short answer is simple: no, it's not.
Comparing Beethoven to Bono is off the mark. It's more accurate to say "free stuff more popular than paid-for" - which doesn't sound quite so revelatory. The honest truth is that free music plus a big name equals lots of downloads. End of story.
In fact, the real story here is just how popular classical music is: the success of the BBC's project blows apart the idea that there is no interest in digitised versions of classical music. The BBC's Beethoven was so popular because it's a genre that remains relatively uncatered for on the web.
The mainstream sales points simply don't carry much of it. Apple's iTunes may be the dominant force in legal downloading, recently passing the milestone of half a billion songs sold, but it's not brilliant for those who aren't into mainstream music.
A quick search of the iTunes Music Store shows just 150 results for "Beethoven" - a middling amount for the casual fan, but hardly comparable in scope to the million other tracks iTunes also sells.
Another reason for the lack of online support for classical is that many serious fans are vociferous and dedicated hi-fi wonks: they use technology to chase the perfect musical experience, but they don't much care for the degraded file formats like MP3. Downloads just aren't good enough for their cultured ears. I can vouch for that - the Mozart I have on my iPod is clearly not as high quality as over my stereo.
Classical's not dead - it's discerning. Fans aren't uncooperative - they're uncared for.
The old stereotype that classical music fans have no interest in technology continues to run riot. But if we can't see that the BBC experience blows this nonsense out of the water, then we never will.
