thumb rules

RULES OF THUMB

Congratulations! Intentionally or not, you've stumbled across the all-important Rules of Thumb: six tenets that guide what you see here at Fingertips:

1. Fingertips will only highlight and recommend music that is legally available. If, in fact, you ever see a link to illegally downloaded music, please contact me and I will quickly investigate the situation and remove the link, if I find that the music is indeed not legally posted.

2. Fingertips will only highlight and recommend quality music. Hm. Well. Isn't quality subjective? Yes...and no. On the one hand, of course, people can disagree on what they like or don't like. But I firmly believe that an underlying sense of quality is less of a subjective idea than we'd usually like to believe. Or maybe not! In any case, I don't apologize for my own idiosyncrasies as I comb the web for what I consider to be good music; in fact, I firmly believe that there is no better way to find good music than to be introduced to it by an informed and passionate guide.

3. Fingertips will only highlight and recommend full-length tracks. I have no interest in listening only to 30 seconds of a song, and don't believe you should either. That's no way to discover new music.

4. Fingertips will highlight and recommend music with no regard to how old a song may be. Any song is new if you haven't heard it before--it could be from 2007 or 1977. While it's undeniably fun to locate a song that's brand new, I consistently feature songs that are a few weeks or a few months old--sometimes even songs that are a year or more old--if only because very often it takes me a while to catch up with everything. There is no reason, as listeners, that we have to be interested in music only during the week it is released--a stance consistently implied by the music industry's relentless focus on what's coming out this week. To be honest, music bloggers, in general, with their hyperactive focus on breaking the latest and greatest new bands, serve only to make matters worse.

5. At Fingertips idiosyncrasy beats comprehensiveness, every time. I will attempt to remain as well-informed as possible, but I will never pretend to be offering an exhaustive view of music on the web. The web's too big for that anyway, and a guy has to sleep every now and then. All I'm looking for is good music; when I find some, I'll write about it here. Feel free to get in touch if you have any suggestions about anything; I'm all ears, and always interested in finding out about good new music. Recognize at the same time, however, that I am under no obligation to agree with anyone else's ideas about what is good, so your suggestions may or may not show up on the pages here at the end of the day.

6. Fingertips understands the power of good vibes. That's all this web site is about, really. Look inside, find your own good vibes, and send them out into the world every day. What can it hurt?

* * *

I understand that these rules of thumb keep Fingertips pretty much on the fringe of things. Major artists don't tend to offer much in the way of free songs online outside of a promotional stream or two. And most of the world is still too obsessed with the idea of stealing music that they have yet to realize they can use the web to discover good music that's here for free. Well, as I see it, life is interesting on the fringe. In any case, there's plenty of good music here.