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Shoutcast (www.shoutcast.com) couldn’t be easier to use just select a genre, then take your pick from the stations listed to start listening. Unlike most of the sites here, it uses PLS (playlist) files. You can’t open these using Windows Media Player, so you’ll need to download a compatible player first we recommend VideoLAN (www.videolan.org). Shoutcast offers a huge range of stations, from Romanian folk to Greek new age. Some particular highlights include Radio Rivendell for Tolkien-inspired tunes, and Aardvark Rock FM for air guitar classics. There’s an ‘International’ option if you’d like to narrow the results down by country the standard results are drawn from all over the world.

Unlike many online radio services, which automatically put together playlists based on your preferred artists and genres, Live 365 (www.live365.com) pitches itself as “online radio stations run by real people”. Type a place, genre or band into the search bar to get started but be prepared for some pretty long audio advertisements. For more options, you will need to become a VIP member. There’s a free five-day trial available, but you will still need to register with a credit card.

Last.fm is a hugely popular online radio site that’s best known for its scrobbler a small program that plugs into your media player of choice and monitors your listening preferences. The site then uses this information to suggest new songs that you might enjoy, look them up on YouTube and play their videos for you. New users are also asked to enter their location, which Last.fm uses to recommend nearby gigs that might be up your street. You can also share recommendations with friends, invite them to events and see what they’re listening to.

Once you’ve registered with Jango (www.jango.com) you’ll only have to listen to one ad per day, though guests are subjected to rather more, including a minute-long ode to burgers that rhymes ‘Mussolini’ with ‘fettuccine’. Pick a station (such as Top Country or Ambient Space) to start listening, and rate each song to affect how often it’s played in the future.

Rather than building personal playlists for you, TuneIn (www.tunein.com) asks for your favourite artists, then suggests real radio stations that are known to play their songs. It also requests your location to help pinpoint stations near you, so your results are likely to be peppered with local student broadcasts as well as larger commercial offerings. The results can be a bit hit-and-miss we wouldn't have drawn many parallels between West Country folk singer Seth Lakeman and Rock Me Amadeus by Austrian one-hitwonder Falco, but that’s all part of the fun.

Unlike the other sites and services in this feature, Absolute Radio (www.absoluteradio.co.uk) is an independent radio station in its own right. Everything is easy to navigate and presented in a fun, cheeky style; you’ll be playfully threatened with assassination if you don’t confirm your email address when you sign up. In addition to the main station (you can listen live, or a pick a song that’s been played recently) there are also dedicated options for every decade since the 1960s, plus one for classic rock. You can watch live sessions recorded especially for Absolute Radio (new ones will be featured on the homepage), and there are biographies and interviews with artists as well. If we had to pick a favourite, it would be this.

UK-based MusicGoal (www.musicgoal.co.uk) isn’t particularly pretty its play buttons are animated GIFs that bring back a wave of early ‘90s web design nostalgia but it gets the job done. Like some of the other sites featured here, it provides a way to find radio stations from around the world that you wouldn’t otherwise discover. Choose a station, then pick your preferred media player to start listening. One downside

is that you might not always get any information about the song that’s currently playing, in which case you’d need to use a smartphone app like Shazam to find out exactly what you’re listening to.

Spotify (www.spotify.com) is perhaps the most famous internet radio service, and is available as a desktop or mobile app, or as a web player for your browser. There’s a huge list of tracks available from major record labels, including B-sides from your favourite artists that you may not have heard before. You can stream music by artist, album, genre or playlist, or get recommendations based on songs that you’ve starred. You can link Spotify to your Facebook account to share playlists with friends, but remember that it will automatically share what you’re currently listening to with all your friends unless you tell it otherwise. Whether that’s a problem depends on how confident you are in your musical tastes.

Radiotuna (www.radiotuna.com) is a simple site that works in a similar way to Shoutcast enter the name of a genre or artist, or take your pick from the menu on the left. You’ll see any stations that are playing your chosen artists right now (a very useful feature that we wish was more common), along with a list of stations that have played them before. Radiotuna features stations from all over the world, making it a great way to find international bands that you might not otherwise come across in your daily listening habits.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the main purpose of Google Play Music (http://music.google.com) is to sell you new

albums. To get started, upload your music collection to Google’s servers using its Music Manager tool. You can then listen to them anywhere via your web browser or smartphone. When you fancy something new, click ‘Google Play Recommends’ to see a list of suggested songs similar to those you already own, along with one-minute previews so you can decide whether or not you’re interested in buying them. Unfortunately, the results are sometimes a little too similar to your existing catalogue  we like Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits, but we don’t really need three versions of it.