"copyrighted" may be true - eventhough such a word doesn't exist. Basically, every time you create something, you have the copyright for it. Of course, if it's derived from other people's work, the copyright is shared - unless you never had permission to use their work. However, that does NOT mean that there isn't free music you may download and redistribute! Just for example, music from these sites can be shared on Gnutella freely as long as you keep the filenames and comment tags as-is:

http://remix.kwed.org/
http://www.ocremix.org/

That may not be your kind of music but there are similar sites for any kind of music. You know, not everybody makes music to earn money or even if they do, they may release some of their tracks for free. It's similar to free software. "free" doesn't imply worse or cheap. A lot of free music and software is even much better than the one you have to pay for.

I haven't listened to any stuff from the "charts" in 2 years or so because I don't use radio or TV any longer. The CDs I bought were not promoted and will probably never be widely known, simply because the kind of music is not played on the radio or elsewhere which doesn't imply that there are not millions of people all over the world that like it or would like it if they only knew it.