The Bates Motel blog is tracking Norwegian music. The motel is looked after by Sindre Ness. Sindre writes in the dying “new-Norwegian” written language. General news, links to MP3s, streams and videos. Sindre seems to be more of a reporter than a critic. Not that it matters — I normally use something like Free Download Manager or LeechGet to scan these sites anyway.

A recent addition to my arsenal of sites, so no tracks checked out from the Bates Motel yet. But do download Hurra Torpedo’s version of Total eclipse of the Heart (video). Hurra Torpedo use white goods like cookers and freezers as their instruments. Nice.

Berlin based MP3 music magazine tonspion.de rates itself as

one of the finest sources for free and legal mp3 downloads on the net for high quality music.

There are hundreds of thousands free MP3 files on the Internet! Most are published legally by artists and labels, with the aim of promoting new albums.

Tonspion reviews the best free mp3 tracks on the net, linking to the source of the download (the artist or the label) and thereby offering access to thousands of mp3s.

Even if you don’t understand our reviews, you can download the music, just by giving it a try. Klick on “Download MP3” at the end of each review and check out the MP3 on the label or artist websites.

A couple of tracks found through Tonspion will be coming up here at Acecast.

Electromancer is a

community of unsigned electronic musicians and a resource where they can make their music available to visitors and other musicians. It provides a friendly and easy-to-use place on the world wide web where visitors, fans of electronic music and musicians alike can come to knowing that all the music will be electronic.

The site is run by Marvey Mills who wants to provide a good quality site for as little cost to the artist as possible.

I haven’t downloaded any tracks from Electromancer so far, so no recommendations yet. Via Podcastingnews.

The Fingertips Site Guide is another metasite listing free and legal music sites.

Several of these sites I knew about (like download.com and the German Tonspion), the rest is “to be investigated”.

Dave Holmes lists dozens of both obscure and well-known podsafe music resources at Dave’s Imaginary Sound Space.

Unfortunately it becomes extremely time consuming for podcasters to source available music and listen to it.

…

The sites I refer to here represent a tiny fraction but even so it’s clear to see the potential pool of music podcasters can draw from. It shows there’s a strong cultural movement that is rapidly taking advantage of new media technologies and confirms podcasting’s role as an important music delivery component.

Time consuming? Yeah — you could say that. I have been through over 4000 tracks over the last year. Around ten percent I have kept and only two percent have been given a 4+ rating in iTunes. Via the Creative Commons blog.