He was also especially in the late '60s - early '70s pretty much the closest thing a post-war composer has ever been to being a genuine 'star' (along with Cage, perhaps). That's certainly when his work was influencing the pop scene to the greatest extent. As pretty much all the obits have mentioned, he's there on the Sgt Pepper's album cover. That means it's certainly newsworthy to a lot of people outside our little classical music world - he even got a big splash in one of the tabloids here although the headline was admittedly 'Köln composer dies'
As to what classical music is doing under the heading 'entertainment' to start with, I can't really help with that one.
