Free downloads of BBC Beethoven symphonies have blown off the lid of the download charts, beating all popular music. “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. It would take a commercial CD recording of the complete Beethoven symphonies ‘upwards of five years’ to sell as many downloads as were shifted from the BBC website in two weeks.”