The BBC is playing the complete works of Beethoven. “These concerts will be aired on Radio 3 and ‘streamed’ for a week on the website. This, as never before, is Beethoven for free – a gift to the world, just as the longsuffering composer might have wished. So radical is this departure from all prior conventions of broadcasting and distributing works of music that the consequences are simply uncalculated. No-one knows if ten people or ten million will download the Beethoven symphonies and whether, if kept, they will form the cornerstone for a new habit of hoarding classical music, a surrogate for record buying.”