If you can't remember life as a music fan in 1999, you'll have to imagine it. No iTunes. No iPods. No Spotify. No bottomless quarry of music clips on YouTube. A new album cost £16.

Fred Durst was the biggest rock star on earth, Campag Velocet were on the cover of NME, and about the most fun you could have online was clicking around a Compuserve chatroom at 3am, wishing you were dead. Or maybe that was just me.

Now look: a torrent of music, never more than a keystroke away, much of it free. Music surrounds us as never before. Meanwhile, the process of making it has been democratised.

Artists no longer need record labels. For those willing to exploit it, the web represents, in Thom Yorke's words, "the most amazing broadcasting network ever built". Lucky us, right?

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