In addition to song reviews and playlists, Fingertips also features intermittent longer essays, typically tackling issues relevant to the evolving digital music scene. These essays were once upon a time published under the name Fingertips Commentary; in more recent years they’ve been presented as regular old blog posts. And more recently than that, some of them have been appearing off site. Links to each can be found below.
Essays will emerge whenever the muse strikes.
Essays to date:
Rescuing classic rock (with bonus playlist)
(Can we undo the damage done by classic rock radio?) 7 Jun 18
Bursting bubbles: the problem with playlists
(Homogenized playlists and their discontents) 2 May 18
Everything wrong with the web, journalism, and music on the internet, in one convenient article
(Junk web content strikes again) 14 Dec 17
Music Delivery and the Empathy Vacuum
(On piracy, empathy, streaming, and autocracy) 8 Feb 17
Full of Schmidt
(Just put all of us into a big blender and spew out data and we’ll be a-okay) 16 Sep 15
In Defense of Quality
(There is nothing innovative about pandering for a profit) 9 Jan 15
Web Comments: Can We Cut the Crap Already?
(It doesn’t have to be like this. Seriously) 7 Oct 14
U2 and the Irony of “Permission Rage” 18 Sep 14
(How dare U2 give me free music that I didn’t have to steal!)
The Narcissism of Free
(Let’s think more clearly about what free music really indicates) 12 Jun 14
The Subtle Sorrow of Social Media
(What do friendship and social media have in common? Maybe not much) 25 Mar 14
Share, Don’t Broadcast [published on the Linn music blog]
(Real sharing is not about 24/7 broadcasting) 12 Mar 14
Is There Any Hope For Eclectic Listening? [published on the Linn music blog]
(Your musical taste is more interesting and powerful than the internet wants to believe) 11 Nov 13
The Power of Repeated Listening [published on the Linn music blog]
(Sometimes it takes a bit of time to know what you like) 10 Jul 13
In Defense of Music [published on the Linn music blog]
(Remembering that the power of music is independent of technology) 29 Aug 12
Are Social Media Values Human Values?
(Some concrete reasons to mistrust social media enterprises) 30 May 12
Everything Looks Like a Nail: The “Social Music” Fallacy
(Is music really “made to be shared”?) 7 Nov 11
It’s Called Viral For a Reason
(On the dubious achievement of “going viral”) 31 Oct 11
Does Genuine Curation Stand a Chance?
(Curating is great, but the web typically defeats it) 14 Oct 11
Forecast: Cloudy
(The underrated importance of music buyers) 16 Sept 11
The Fate of Music in the Age of No Effort
(Convenience isn’t all it’s cracked up to be) 2 June 11
The Tyranny of Novelty
(We encourage the novel over the good, sadly enough) 8 Apr 11
Spamalot (Or, New Adventures in BitTorrentland)
(Indie band invents the spam album; hilarity ensues) 24 Mar 11
Portishead, Twitter, and Resisting Digital Ideology
(Do we all want to be ideologues? Really?) 14 Jan 11
Free Is Not The End
(Why technology-induced chaos is meant to be tamed) 13 Sept 10
The Free Music Mirage
(Why some music but not all music will be free) 3 May 10
Playlist Nation: The Unbearable Lightness of Sharing
(Online playlist sharing is an exercise in collective expressive futility) 22 Mar 10
Farewell to the Casual Music Fan
(Why catering to so-called “true fans” could backfire on rock’n’roll) 9 Nov 09
Music is Not Like Water
(Exposing the idiocy of many of today’s “future of music” ideas) 29 Apr 09
Got to Do What You Should
(A Free and Legal MP3 Manifesto) 26 Jan 09
The Sound of a Brand New World
(What to make of Radiohead’s In Rainbows pay-as-you-will experiment) 10 Jan 08
The Future (or Not) of the Album
(How the CD, not the internet, slayed the album) 2 Aug 07
The Secret…Okay, a Different One
(Examining the reality of bad opinions) 24 Mar 07
Foulplay
(Why critics hating Coldplay reflects worse on them than the band) 16 Jul 05
14 Arguments for the Elimination of Pop Music Critics
(Self-explanatory) 10 Feb 05
Alarmed
(Getting a handle on 50+ years of rock’n’roll) 16 Mar 04
