THE days of standing by your radio/cassette recorder with your index finger on the pause/record button are long gone. With digital music you can now fill up your MP3 player with music absolutely free. And you don't even have to break the law.

Here is a rough guide on where to start.

THE BIG GUNS iTunes www. apple. com/itunes May as well start with the big bad wolf. iTunes is facing an uncertain future as consumer watchdogs and antitrust lawyers have cottoned on to the fact that maybe it is not such a cool thing that you need an iPod to use the internet's biggest jukebox.

Imagine if you bought a CD that would only play on one brand of stereo and no others. Would you be happy? Norway has given iTunes until October before it throws the book at it, with the Germans and plenty of other countries lining up to follow suit.

Expect an opening up in the next few years, once the system has become the default for most people. In the meantime iTunes keeps innovating, offering playlists and limited-edition bonus tracks. It's also a one-stop shop for many of the podcasts featured below.

My Space www. myspace. com MySpace has superseded many band websites in importance, with many now merely offering a link to the MySpace page, where new songs are posted in lieu of the album. Many offer tracks free for download and stream lots of others. It's also invaluable for information and biographies.

MEDIA PODCASTS British and US newspapers now offer excellent music podcasts in various formats. Here are a few:

Guardian Unlimited www. guardian. co. uk Online every Thursday, this magazine-style format features a panel of Guardian critics reviewing the week's releases with a guest "in the Pod". Badly Drawn Boy, Lady Sov and many more have featured recently but the lack of music is a drawback.

Times Online www. timesonline. co. uk Taking itself a little more seriously (but with more music) is the London Times' weekly music podcast. Last month it featured had Mika for 45 minutes, but the interviewer practically had to crawl back out of his back passage by the end such was his star-strickenness. Let's call it teething problems. As with the Guardian, subscribe on iTunes and each weekly instalment is automatically uploaded to your iPod when you plug in.

New York Times www. nytimes. com The best one around, featuring properly researched and considered album reviews of three or four artists from the daily paper's music critics.

Recent highlights included a Frames review, an interview with The Police and an exclusive interview with Son Volt's Jay Farrar. The range of music is wide, with jazz, indie and country all getting a fair slice of time.

RADIO STATIONS KCRW www. kcrw. com British expat Nic Harcourt's Morning Becomes Eclectic programme has been an excellent source of new music from the US for years and the live sessions have been made into some excellent (if difficult to obtain) CDs. Now the live sessions are available as podcasts. No messing, straight into the music and free as a bird.

National Public Radio www. npr. org NPR is the exception that proves US independent radio is on its knees. An excellent web resource, the site streams interviews and makes concerts available for download. Last week recent gigs by The Good, The Bad And The Queen and Arcade Fire were available free for download. I'm serious. Hurry.

Last FM www. last. fm Your own personal radio station.

Search for a song and it comes up with a playlist of other artists you may like. After listening you discover that any notions you ever had that your taste in music was original fly out the window.

VIDEO YouTube www. youtube. com With Viacom's recently filed $1bn lawsuit against the video clip site's owner Google, it may be time to enjoy the world's most popular video-streaming service before it goes down the YouTube.

A pity because if it dies so may the music video as we know it.

The Pirates. . .

A MYRIAD of illegal download websites still operate over the internet for those who don't see a moral or legal dilemma in bypassing the record companies or paying artists royalties.

The most popular site, which commands around 20% of overall business on the net, is Allofmp3. com, a filesharing site often dubbed the 'Russian Napster'.

Napster was famously sued by the record industry but has successfully relaunched as a legitimate site, while the Moscow-based site is currently being sued by a clutch of record companies including Warner and Universal as well as British industry umbrella organisation the BPI. Other sites also make use of the loophole in Russian copyright law including Gomusic. ru which operates on a subscription basis. The Swedish anti-copyright anarchists The Pirate Bay have been operating BitTorrent filesharing for years and openly scoff at attempts to close them down.

They even print their email responses to all the threats to put them asleep. Very amusing.