This Week's Finds - introduction

THIS WEEK'S FINDS -- introduction

This Week's Finds offers a weekly look at the music I've found online over the course of the previous week.

This is a good page to check if you're interested in a regular, hand-picked dose of quality free and legal music and don't have the time or patience required to hunt around for it yourself. While most of the rest of Fingertips points you to sites where you can explore on your own, This Week's Finds tells you what I in particular have found week to week that I believe is worth listening to.

New at year-end 2007 is the Fingertips This Week's Finds Player--a Flash-based media player that allows you to listen to the songs on the page on the spot, without downloading them. It even has pictures, which is quite the innovation here on Fingertips.

Just because I'm writing about something in a given week does not necessarily mean it is newly released. Sometimes I have to listen to a song for a relatively long time to know whether I like it enough to write about it.

And sometimes I simply don't come across a song until it's been out for weeks, or months, or even years.

As music listeners, I think we owe ourselves the freedom to realize that any song we've never heard before is new, regardless of when it came out.

This Week's Finds will be focused on songs that are relatively undiscovered from an American mainstream point of view, for reasons I attempt to explain here. An overall effort to describe the sort of music likely to be heard within This Week's Finds, as well as everywhere else here on Fingertips, can be found here.

Note that from the start I made a decision to feature only three songs once a week. While this flies in the face of the daily posting protocol favored by the blog-frenzied among us, I believe it is a sane and realistic approach that neither overloads the visitor nor overtaxes the staff at this end (i.e. me). I also believe it is in line with the type of person I imagine to be most enticed by Fingertips--intelligent music lovers who do, however, have any number of other things they have to do from day to day.

The past couple of months' worth of This Week's Finds will stay on the This Week's Finds page below the current week's entry. There are archives available for earlier entries; be aware that the older the archive, the more likely some of the MP3s featured are no longer available. Fortunately, since the onset of the Amazon MP3 store, I have been able in many cases to provide buy links for MP3s that are no longer available for free but are in fact available for 89 or 99 cents via Amazon. They are still good songs, even if you have to buy them.

If after looking around Fingertips you realize you are really interested only in the This Week's Finds feature, please note that there are two other, potentially more convenient, ways to access it.

One is via the Fingertips blog, which is devoted entirely to the weekly selections found in This Week's Finds. This blog is available via RSS feed also, for those who utilize such things.

The other maybe even more convenient way to keep track of This Week's Finds is to sign up for the weekly mailing list; you can read more about that here.