This past September something innovative happened in Boston. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum launched a webcast. It wasn't just any webcast, it was a creative commons licensed release of concerts performed as part of the long standing museum concert series. It's allowed users world wide to take in a little classical music culture by downloading the file and playing it on their iPod, in the windows media center or whatever MP3 compatible device they choose.

As of this week there are 15 episodes of The Concert, or the over siplified version: fifteen concerts, available for download on the ISGM website. But they're hitting the big time now. This week The Concert climbed to number 31 of the most downloaded podcasts on the iTunes "top podcasts" directory listing. Just behind pop culture favorite Best Week Ever from VH1, comedy Scrubs and the Nightly News from NBC, as well as Xeni Tech off the NPR feed. It seems to us to be a pretty large achievement for a small art museum to propel themselves, with great success, on the cutting edge of technology. Apparently we're not the only ones to be surprised. Fast Company profiled the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's effort with The Concert in their February issue. They cite astronomical numbers for the webcast – 40,000 downloads a month for a classical program. That's about four times as many monthly downloads as other Classical programs, and again they aren't usually mentioned in the same sentence as Best Week Ever either.