Digital radios: Spotify: listen to free streamed music online Spotify as a personalised online radio station

Create an online radio station

Choosing the Radio option from the left hand menu bar brings up a selection of decades and genres which can be used to filter the songs played on your personalised playlist.

If, for example, you want to listen to a mixture of soul, blues, funk and country from the 50s to the 80s then you can.

The timeline filter lets you choose music from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s and even has a category for ‘older’ music.

Genres include alternative, blues, country, disco, funk, hard rock, heavy metal, hip-hop, house, jazz, new wave, R&B, pop, punk, reggae, rock, soul and techno, which should cater for most music tastes.

If you're using the free, ad-funded version of Spotify then a brief audio advert will occasionally play between tracks.

When we first listened to Spotify in February 2009, we found that the ads weren't too intrusive and played roughly every 20 minutes, but since then, as Spotify has become more popular, ads have become more regular, and there’s no way to fast forward through them.