If you haven’t come across it yet, Spotify is an absolutely brilliant web site both for listening to the music of your choice and for discovering new music for free.

All you need to do is download the free player to start building your own playlists or listen to the various ‘radio’ stations that are grouped by music genre. You just register with an e-mail address, and no, you are not inundated with spam because of it. Their catalogue of music is very comprehensive and thousands of albums are being added every week.

There are many nice features:suggestions for artists that play a similar kind of music to the one you are listening to, find their whole list of albums/tracks by an artist, biographies of all the artists, ‘radio’ stations play one track from an album and then move on, you can create shared playlists so that others can add to them and more! There is a help system but instructions are fairly limited, so it is worth clicking on everything available - remember to ‘right click’ as well as ‘left click’ as there are often different options available. The player actually reacts as quickly as ones that are installed on my own computer!

OK, I hear you say, so is this one of those illegal downloading sites? Absolutely not!

Well, how do they make money, and what about the artists? Spotify uses two methods of generating money, a portion of which goes to the artists - on a free account there is advertising in the form of ads at the side of the player and, about every 20mins, there is an audio ad lasting around 20-30 seconds. In practice this is very unobtrusive, far less so than on commercial radio. As a demonstration of how legitimate the site is I’ve even heard ads from our own government departments! If you really can’t put up with the ads you can pay £10 per month (bit steep). Alternatively, and this is a very nice feature, if you want to be ad free because you are having a party or whatever you can buy a ‘day pass’ for just 99p.