I have an admission to make; I’m one of those horrible music snobs, who will peer through you music collection, flicking through the copies of Coldplay, mumbling incoherently and slowly shaking my head in desperation. 

Of course, everybody thinks that their own music taste is actually perfect, and it’s everybody else who just doesn’t understand the rythmic subleties of Take That, or the way that Bon Jovi gives you goosebumps, Every. Single. Time.

Thanks to the internet, you can now share your godawful guilty pleasures (and hopefully some occasional hidden gem) with your friends via the wonders of Spotify, a music-streaming application that for once actually copes with that rare combination of being both legal and useful.

Spotify. Kermits favourite music client

Founded in 2006, Spotify essentially acts as a massive online music library, designed to serve tracks that you request via your internet connection, with only the occasional break for a quick advert inbetween (at least for free users - paid accounts are available which do away with the adverts).

All pretty cool stuff so far – but it gets better. Spotify allows you to create links that enable you to share not only individual tracks with other users, but also custom playlists that you can generate yourself.  Shared playlists can then be manipulated by the people you share it with, automatically updating your list as they do so.

Ultimately it’s good to finally see some movement being made within the music industry to try to embrace the way that media – and especially music – is shared between it’s consumers.  Spotify not only allows you to legally listen to music, with only the minimum of disruptions from adverts, but it also helps share the music between the people who really want to listen to it (especially when combined with the #musicmonday hashtag on Twitter), sometimes getting people to hear bands that they might not otherwise have been exposed to.