It has come to my attention, ;-) that there is a ton of contemporary music, including MP3's by most of the composers we talk about here, available through the Soulseek P2P system. I don't want to get into the ethics of this process, which are controversial, however, I do think that as a way to sample new music, this could possibly be one of the most important new music promotional processes underway today.
Because Soulseek allows the P2P file sharer to browse other shared files, one can easily find other recordings by similar artits. I've seen PDF's of Ligeti's etudes, complete Stockhausen Licht recordings, Messiaen, Sciarrino, Xenakis, and others.
I'm not going to argue about the economic consequences of this process, so folks who might get upset about this, flame away. But I find it encouraging that there are literally hundreds of 20 somethings out there finding out about, and digging Ligeti, et al, because of this network.
As far as I'm concerned, the biggest problem facing new music is the lack of ears, without that arguing about the lack of sales is meaningless.
Just a pointer... http://www.slsk.org - for the software.