Free and Legal MP3s Are at Your Fingertips

The ongoing music piracy debate has distracted music fans from tapping into storehouse of quality free and legal music from established musicians. Fingertips, an edited and frequently updated web site, seeks to be an intelligent guide to great free and legal online music.

Merion, PA (PRWEB) December 21, 2003 --Is everyone clear on the fact that all the big record companies really don't want people downloading illegally distributed songs off the web?

Good. Now let's talk about music for a change, rather than economics. Because that's what music fans care about: notes and rhythms and harmonies and lyrics and stuff. And the real news about music online has nothing to do with illegal distribution and piracy. The real news is that the web has over the past five years become a vast storehouse of high-quality, free and legal MP3s. That's right: there is a large and ever-expanding supply of songs online, by worthy artists, that are there legally and cost music fans absolutely nothing to download.

There are three main reasons why we don't tend to hear much about these free and legal MP3s.

First, the piracy debate is a juicier story for news outlets hungry for point-counterpoint style controversy. When talk turns to MP3s, all we seem to hear about is the widespread availability of illegally distributed music online on the one hand and the efforts to begin selling legal MP3s online to counter the spread of illegal MP3s on the other. But what we are rarely told is that many musicians and record companies are finding it beneficial to offer free and legal MP3s online. They want their stuff downloaded and shared.

The second reason we don't hear much about the free and legal MP3s is that the overwhelming majority of songs available legally and for free online are, well, terrible. Technological advances have greatly reduced the barrier to entry for musicians who want to record and distribute music; this is not always a good thing.

But the staggering number of unlistenable songs available legally and for free online should not distract attention from the fact that there are plenty of truly wonderful MP3s online that are free and legally available, both from recognized artists such as Norah Jones and Joe Strummer as well as from lesser-known musicians of quality such as Over the Rhine and Juana Molina.

The third reason we don't hear about free, legal MP3s is because they are not housed in any centralized way. Worthwhile MP3s that are both free and legal are scattered across hundreds if not thousands of different web sites around the world--on the sites of individual artists, on small record company sites, and on a wide variety of sites that act as "MP3 hubs," including well-known destinations such as Amazon.com and far less well-known enterprises like Epitonic.com and Insound.com.

Figuring that someone had to make high-quality, free-and-legal MP3s easier to find, Philadelphia-based writer and editor Jeremy Schlosberg has launched a web site called Fingertips to do just that. Music aficionado Schlosberg has created Fingertips as an informed and literate effort to point internet users in the direction of the wide range of quality free and legal music that is available online.

Fingertips scours the web so you don't have to; at the same time, it's a web site that rejects the common online approach that "more is better." Fingertips is not a comprehensive clearinghouse listing every last MP3 found anywhere online. Rather, it is a discerning resource that, in its own way, harkens back to the heyday of progressive FM radio--a time when music fans could discover all kinds of marvelous music through the idiosyncratic taste and expert guidance of individual disc jockeys.

LOG ON AND LISTEN: http://www.fingertipsmusic.com