The Christian Music Finder Reference Database  A brief project history

The project now known as The Christian Music Finder began as two completely different projects, with two completely different titles: The Music Locator, which was a database of printed Christian music begun in 1976 by Bill Burns at Resource Publications, Inc., and MusiCatalog, which was a database of recorded Christian music at the song title level. MusiCatalog was begun in 1974 by D. Neil Neuenschwander, who, at the time, was the owner of a group of Christian bookstores in Southern California, and was also the president of the Christian Booksellers Association. In 1976 these two projects joined forces at Resource Publications, Inc., and functioned as twin directories, called The Music Locator and The Recording Locator, respectively.

The project struck a need among music dealers and libraries, because among other things it was unique in taking information about available Christian music down to the song title level. The project grew and added content and features over the years. We changed the name to The Christian Music Directories in the late 1980s, and the books continued to grow in size and in features. It now represents almost 600,000 songs  from over 1,700 music publishers, large and small.

In 1995 we introduced one of the first e-books anywhere, called The Christian Music Finder, which listed the content of both of the two huge reference books on a single CD Rom, which was available for a fraction of the cost of the printed volumes.

In 2001, because the thickness of the reference books required us to consider going to two volumes for each directory, we decided to cease publication of The Christian Music Directories database in printed form.  Instead we urged music dealers to participate in the electronic CD version, thus effectively changing the name of the project to The Christian Music Finder.

In 2006 The Christian Music Finder Online was released. It is based on the same database of song titles and music collections, but it permits access and searches from an ordinary web browser, with no software to install or update. At the same time, it permits music publishers ready access to their data which facilitates the correction of errors and the addition of new titles from each company.

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