Free music. No telling how many times the words free music have been typed into Google search boxes by people all over the world. And because of Web sites like Pitchfork, Muziic and Last FM, to name just a few, and much to the displeasure of ASCAP and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the recording industry in general, free music is increasingly becoming something that Internet users take for granted.

I'm not talking about p2p (peer-to-peer) sites like Napster, which was shut down by a court order in 2001, or FrostWire or BitTorrent or the host other file sharing sites all of which in my estimation are allowing unethical access to copyrighted material which I, and I believe a majority of people, feel ought to be illegal. No, I'm talking about sites that aren't p2p like the first three I mentioned as well as sites like Playlist.com, Pandora and Grooveshark. Most people, myself included, believe that these sites are not violating copyright laws because all they do is scour the Internet and make available a link to material that is already online.

Of all the, what I consider to be legal and ethical, free music sites by far the coolest and the best is a site created by Adam Pash, the Editor-in-Chief of the hugely popular Tech site Lifehacker. A couple of years ago Adam created and put up Mixtape.me and he's been working to perfect it ever since.

I've enbedded a short playlist of songs I recently made on Mixtape.me that you'll see at the top of this text box. Why don't you double-click on one of the songs while you finish reading this article about how to use Mixtape.me to legally listen to and share free music on the Web.

Mixtape.me has been made to look like and operate like a Desktop music player like Winamp but Mixtape.me is strictly browser-based so there's nothing to download or install. All you need to do is go to http://mixtape.me/ and sign-up.

In fact, you don't actually need to sign-in with a user name and password to listen to music on the site. You can click open a Playlist that is featured on the site and double-click any song that is listed in any of these playlists to start listening. When that song is finished the song just below it will automatically begin. You can even search for songs in the search box without being logged into the site and the songs you search for will play. But it's fun to create your own playlists and the only way you can do that is to sign-up for a user name and password on Mixtape.me.

Once you've logged into Mixtape.me, creating a playlist is pretty simple. It's all done with drag-and-drop. You use the search box to find a song and then drag it to the Quick Playlist box on the lower left side of the page or drag and drop the song to a playlist you've already created that will be listed in a box just above the Quick Playlist box called Playlists. You'll notice a + sign next to the word Playlist in this box. Clicking that plus sign will create a new playlist. Just type a name for the new playlist and hit your Enter Key and you've created a new playlist. You can now start dragging songs to that playlist. Cool, huh?

There's a lot of things you can do on Mixtape.me besides creating playlists that you can share with your friends or embed in your Websites, like finding the lyrics to songs, reading bios of artists and bands and finding links to videos. Messing around on Adam Pash's Mixtape.me is a lot of fun. I hope you'll give it a try and if you do I'm sure you'll enjoy playing around with it as much as I do.