© NRK.no.

DJ Friendly occasionally plays electronica shows based purely on free and legal mp3s (Norwegian Broadcasting). I discovered him today and will give him a listen (he just played tracks from the Chemical Brothers’ new album). There’s bound to be some gems on his playlists (electronic music being one of Norway’s strongholds; Røyksopp and Biosphere the top of our iceberg).

His show-page is in Norwegian only (advantage me), but DJ Friendly’s top-25 electronica legal MP3s for 2004 is understandable in any language.

The NRK.no radio player does not find DJ Friendly when I search for “friendly” (but I find the archives when searching for “DJ”). The playlists are a month out of date. A bit unfriendly, so a resource for hardcore electronica fans with lots of time on their hands.

This is where I hit my first taxonomy problem: where do I put DJ Friendly’s page? Is he an artist? He probably is (as a DJ), but this programme does not fall in the artist category. Is this an “mp3 site”? Not really. But to avoid navigation nigthmare I’ll stick to just “artists” and “mp3sites” for mp3 links. DJ Friendly goes into “mp3sites”.

Update 20050219: DJ Friendly’s February 2005 mp3 playlist. Some of the music seems to be in that grey legal area though; mashups and unauthorised remixes are included.

Initial post: Tue, 11 Jan 2005.

Download Punk — as it says on the tin. Albums containing free MP3s are clearly marked and so are the tracks themselves. No streaming preview (prelisten?). Find minor and major American punk bands (NOFX, Rancid) here.

Anti seems to be the choice of the old guard of leftfield artists: Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Tricky and Marianne Faithful are all on this label. A new act like the Black Keys is also on Anti. This is one of the better label-sites I have come across: clear presentation, running news, tour dates and you can listen to each artist. One major miss though: no way to buy the complete releases from the site.

Link via Spikemagazine’s weblog (splinters).

I struggle a bit with betterPropaganda. There is no hint of the quality of the MP3s (bitrate) are before you start the download and I can’t get the site to work with Firefox (the .asp file extension is the giveaway). But worst of all: around half of the time I hit the “Free MP3” button there is no free MP3. Usability score zero for this annoyance:

Sorry, but this song is stream only. You can click the ‘Listen’ button to hear the song, but you can’t save the file on your computer.

Expect to find artists like Low, DJ Dangermouse, Quincy Jones, loads of unknown bands and speeches by Noam Chomsky. The focus is on rock, electronic and hip-hop.

A site with a decent concept, but lots of room for improvement on the usability side (shame).