Dan Hill blogs that BBC Radio 3 Online’s initiative to provide free downloads of all Beethoven’s symphonies has been highly successful.

Not everyone thinks that this is necessarily a good thing – no commercial agency can really compete with the BBC’s ability to provide free online media, and if the BBC expanded this service a lot of websites would lose custom.

But for the rest of us it’s great. To watch how the BBC might implement such ideas further will be fascinating – don’t forget, some of the BBC’s many websites continue to be among the most progressively designed in the world. And as Dan says, it looks likely that they might:

Lots of extremely interesting questions continue to be raised by the success of our trials – from distribution to commercial policy, from music strategies to on-demand radio, from marketing to navigation and so on – and we’re feeding a lot of the learning and creative ideas right into the heart of the various bits of strategic and tactical BBC work going on at the moment.