It is a fairly well-known fact that iTunes is hosting the iTunes Live Festival this month – 31 bands playing over 62 nights at Camden’s Roundhouse. A much less well-known fact is that these tickets are actually winnable.

Now, I hear you logicians revving up your engines (“Everything’s winnable, you innumerate fool, it’s simply a matter of probability”) and I’m going to cut you off here: some things are just not that winnable. £10,000,000. Porsche Speedsters. Two-week holidays in the Maldives. I have entered competitions to win these very things many, many times, and I have not won. (It is likely I never will.) But tickets to the iTunes Festival? Entered once, and won.*

At this point, dear reader, I strongly advise you to enter for yourself.

My tickets were for La Roux on Saturday 11 July. I won the tickets on Wednesday 8 July, so I had just enough time to locate a date and assemble an outfit. Technical note: we did not wear plaid, but my date and I noted that just about everyone else did. Clearly an indie thing.

La Roux on the iTunes bigscreen

The iTunes Festival is run with military precision. You receive word of your victory via email, and once you activate a link within this email, into your inbox swoops an e-ticket with a barcode on it. And that, my friends, is it. Print this bad boy and off to the gig you go.

We queued outside the venue for just ten minutes — not too bad at all. At the door I presented my ticket for scanning, and then we were given the nod, decked with wristbands and passes (on the back of each was a unique voucher code for ten free downloads from the iTunes store!), and directed to the bar. An auspicious beginning!

The opening act, Dan Black, went on at about eight, and La Roux an hour or so after. The gig was filmed by several cameras and attendees are encouraged to tweet, text, snap and video the event (all via iPhone, natch). Plenty of bars (under a tenner for two spirits and mixers) in the venue meant plenty of good-natured hollering and dubious dancing — indeed, the ginger chanteuse herself commented on one VIP’s dodgy moves.

La Roux on stage

And the star of the show? Perhaps a little nervous to start, but she sang her songs, worked the room and, as mentioned, good-naturedly ribbed at least one attendee about the shapes he was throwing (alas your correspondent did not spot these and cannot comment). The show wrapped with a better-known track – I think it was Bulletproof – and then lights up and exit. No encore, no fuss — but as it’s a free gig, who’s complaining?

Total spent: tickets were free, of course, so just drinks: £14.

Total saved: given that the last gig I went to cost about £20, and that entry to my last Roundhouse event was £24, I’ll split the difference and say I saved £22 with my free ticket.

*And the easy winning doesn’t stop there! I entered the tougher competition (not through Facebook), and the day after I won, my friends V and K won tickets to Jack Penate and Bat For Lashes, respectively. It’s winnable, I tell you – winnable!