Amadeus, rocked

As reported in Red Herring:

Sometimes a great idea can be just a little too good. When the International Mozart Foundation placed the vast works of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart online Monday, its organizers had no idea how swiftly the news would travel.

The response was immediate and immense. Just hours after the news became public, as of 1 a.m. Tuesday local time for Salzburg, Austria, the site where the composer’s works were placed appeared to have crashed.

Within the first two hours of the announcement, the foundation’s site received 45,000 hits, according to Reuters, which first reported the news. The report said that Ulrich Leisinger, program director for the International Mozart Foundation was surprised by the response.

45,000 hits isn't a lot, actually--for example, every time you visit this page it counts as about 60 hits, about 60 .jpg files are called up--but that's just how many they were able to measure, so who knows how slow the site was running before it crashed altogether.

I wonder how many of those people were actually interested in looking at musical scores, which are not something you can read off the bat, versus how many came thinking they could hear all of his works.

In any case--how many hits will Britney Spears garner 250 years after her birth?

Uncredited image of Mozart found in various places online.