New music is always likely to stir up different responses in different people. But before you can formulate such a response you need to encounter the stuff! Concert-programmers are highly circumspect and rarely dare more than a little piece to open a concert, and never in the second half, heaven forbid. Of course, if contemporary music is your thing then you’ve dedicated concerts for sampling it. And that’s where the internet can play an important role – though the irony is that new music, which by its very nature needs to be heard to start its journey towards broader exposure, is often bound up by copyright issues (which, of course, being new is unavoidable). So the opportunities to sample are often somewhat curtailed.

One record label that has devoted itself unswervingly to the dissemination of new music is NMC, which last year picked up another Gramophone Award for its splendid "NMC Songbook". Newly unveiled on its website (nmcrec.co.uk), it’s a fine new initiative that allows you to place a composer in a kind of musical genealogy of influences, schools and styles. I recently stumbled across the music of Richard Ayres (b1965) – purely because the player on the NMC website loaded it and started playing it –and I must admit I was hooked. But how do you characterise music like this? Here is what NMC says: "This colourful disc showcases Richard Ayres’s melodic, eclectic and theatrical style, which owes as much to the exuberance of Janácek as Kagel’s experiments. As Ayres explains, ‘I want to use consonance, dissonance, melody, texture, elephants, clouds, snowballs, anything, from any time and whenever it is needed’’. This at least steers you towards a certain expectation. But if you fire up NMC's new Music Map (illustrated top), you are given a chart that explains Ayres’s musical "pedigree", connects him to some of his influences and teachers, and places him in a solar system that contains three historical categories: Theatrical ("Composers who are largely preoccupied with dramatic texts and stage works or whose work contains a theatrical element, not necessarily related to the stage"), Postmodern ("Composers drawing upon, and mixing, elements from Tradition, Modernism and the Avant-garde, but in a playful, ironic, a‑historical spirit") and Post-Tonal ("Composers who retain roots in tonality without being either traditionally tonal or totally chromatic/atonal"), with Theatrical and Post-tonal being closer to the centre of the universe than Postmodern. I think I’d have liked the little category descriptions to list other composers who fit into these groups.

The chart also links Ayres to his teachers Morton Feldman and Louis Andriessen, as well as Mauricio Kagel – a roll-over descriptor, again, might have been nice. But I do like the idea and it certainly goes a long way towards demystifying what can be a very disconcerting art form. Actually the mention of Janácek in the NMC thumbnail description of Ayres’s music intrigued me more than the mention of the living composers. Come the fourth movement, "Exit", of NONcerto 37b for Orchestra there truly is Janácek, magnificently transmogrified in a spectacularly 21st-century way.

In April I mentioned that Chandos’s download store (classicalshop.net) was about to be unveiled in updated guise. Well, that has happened and very handsome it looks! The site offers recordings in a variety of file-types: MP3, four lossless formats (WAV, FLAC, WMA and AIFF), and now it also provides high-quality, better-than-CD quality 24-bit 96kHz files (at the moment these are primarily restricted to Chandos recordings).If you buy a recording in "studio-master" quality you automatically get it as MP3 and CD-quality lossless files as well.

Pricing is focused in a number of bands: MP3 files for between £4.80 and £7.99; lossless for £7.99 to £9.99; and the 24-bit files at £15.99 per album. (Certain surround-sound recordings will also be on offer at £19.99.)

All recordings offered at classicalshop.net are DRM free, allowing ease of transfer between storage and playback devices. Some 70 labels are carried, which include: Albany, Arts, Avie, Brana, Centaur, Chandos, Coro, Collegium, Danacord, Delphian, Diversions, Divine Art, Doyen, Egon, Guild, JCL, Landor, LSO Live, Metier, Naxos, Nimbus, NMC, Obsidian, Onyx, Pentatone, Priory, Pristine Audio, Quartz, Saydisc, SDG, Signum, Somm, Toccata Classics, Unicorn-Kanchana and Wigmore Hall Live. Together there are approximately 350,000 tracks on offer, with many thousands being added each month.

Booklets are also available for download simultaneously with the sound files. In addition, the site promises a daily 25 per cent discount on a selected album.

The Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall currently has a special offer that allows anyone to sample the site in action. In the comfort of your own home you can attend, free of charge, a Philharmonie performance by Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Phil of Haydn’s Symphony No 92, filmed in high-definition. This offer will run into June (dch.berliner-philharmoniker.de). And if you’re a regular visitor to the DCH, April’s concerts feature the following: a programme of Bach, Haydn and Mozart (including the Piano Concerto No 20) directed from the keyboard by András Schiff (April 17); Janácek, Schoenberg (Piano Concerto with Pierre-Laurent Aimard) and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony under Jirí Belohlávek (April 24); and a concert conducted by Daniel Barenboim of Wagner’s Meistersinger Act 3 Prelude, Elgar’s Cello Concerto (Alisa Weilerstein) and Brahms’s First Symphony (April 27).

Last month I enthused about the new website (and download facility) offered by DaCapo (dacapo-records.dk), the Danish record label. I commented that payment is made in Euros, proving quite expensive. I’m delighted to be corrected – you can pay in sterling, at which rate the albums are priced on a par with other sites.

The essential download playlist No 33 - 10 mezzos

Cecilia Bartoli: "Sacrificium" (Decca) iTunes / Passionato

Sarah Connolly: Schumann Songs (Chandos) classicalshop.net / iTunes

Joyce DiDonato: "Furore" Handel arias (Virgin) iTunes / Passionato

Bernarda Fink: Brahms Lieder (Harmonia Mundi) eMusic / iTunes

Susan Graham: "Un frisson français" (Onyx) eMusic / iTunes

Sophie Koch: Schumann Myrthen (Cascavelle) iTunes

Petra Lang: Wagner Lohengrin (Ortrud) (Profil) iTunes / eMusic

Sara Mingardo: Handel Duets (with Sandrine Piau) (Naïve) eMusic / iTunes

Anne Sofie von Otter: "Ombre de mon amant" (DG) iTunes / Passionato

James Jolly