Cassette tapes. Audio cassette tapes. Lightyears (or maybe only a couple earth years) ahead of video cassette tapes were the wonderfully compact and durable cassette tapes. Now that I think of it they were way more compact than compact disks, but I digress. I have wasted too much time on cds already and this post is about cassette tapes.
Oh yes, I still have it! The cassette AND the fever. But this post is not about store bought cassettes either. Nonononono, go to any yard sale or thrift store and there will likely be piles of cassette tapes. Today we are going to talk about live concert recordings and the bootleg tape trading market that has all but dissappeared.
Don't worry, it's not going to be a lecture, no one got time for that. It more like a, "WTF do I do with these things?" kind of post.
Yep. That's a box full of 100 tapes up there.
And down here we have another 50 more.
I'm not sure how it started, but sometime in the mid 80's I got into the bootleg tape trading game. And it was strictly trading, I never bought or sold a show to anyone. The way it worked was either a show for show trade or if there was not a show of interest two blank tapes could be traded for one recorded tape.
Yep, still got some of those too! "But Summertooth", you say, "how did you find other people who were into this? And how did you communicate with them?"
Great question!
Mail.
Like, the U.S. mail!
I remember a magazine called Goldmine, it was a music collectors magazine, and in the back, in the classified section, people would place ads saying," live concert recordings for trade, for list of shows available send your list and a SASE (free high five if you know what this stands for) to:........
Then by the late 80's the internet was coming on the scene. Oh my goodness, I just remembered something, I HAD A TAPE TRADING WEBSITE! I wonder.....yep....wow, internet, you really are forever.
As you can see, I amassed quite a few shows from some of my favorite artists and yes, I used to listen to them all the time. Most are decent audience recordings, a few are great soundboard copies.
But now I have a bit of a dilemma, I don't know what to do with these. I still love music but I don't care about physical copies of it anymore. All my cds got copied to my computer and given away long ago, I am currently selling the records in my record collection (well, only the collectable ones) and now, while cleaning out my storage shed, I found these!
Whatamma gonnado?Seriously though, what should I do? Is there anyone interested in these? I suppose I would give them away for the cost of postage, but I can't imagine anyone would want these. And even if there is someone, somewhere that is interested, good luck finding them, right?
So I'd love to hear from you. If you have an idea of what I should do with these, let me know. If you want to share a story about collecting, go for it. If you want to send me some STEEM in exchange for these, I'm down. And even though I don't want these any longer its going to be hard to give them away, but I have a felling these are going to end up at my local thrift store in the near future.