Beethoven Bashes Bono and Beatles in Britain [sorry, I got carried away]

Now here's an optimistic development.

The Observer reports:

Forget Coldplay and James Blunt. Forget even Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which, in the version performed at Live8 by Sir Paul McCartney and U2, has become the fastest online-selling song ever. Beethoven has routed the lot of them.

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.

Read it here.

It's really nice that Ludwig is more than holding his own against the kids. What these stats tell us, though, is a bit surprising. Most people think of the internet, and especially the music sites, as being dominated by adolescent males. The popular downloads definitely skew much, much older.