Here's The Article I Was Mentioned In
The Net's Rise Casts Some Light
On Tape Trading's Secret World
By MICHAEL BROADHURST
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL INTERACTIVE EDITION
WALKING OUT of a concert you truly enjoyed is the stuff of mixed feelings:
You cherish the moment, trying to remember every last second from the
opening note to the last moments of the encore, but there's also a certain
disappointment because -- unless a record label releases that particular
show as a live album -- those moments are lost forever.
Well, maybe not.
There's a secret world out there of people whose hobby is taping live shows
on the sly and trading those tapes with other fans. For years, those fans
plied their trade through ads in the back of fanzines and word of mouth.
Now, the Internet has given tape traders a virtual meeting place and an
opportunity to link up with thousands of their own. At the same time,
advances in digital technology are making top-quality recordings easy to
make and easier to duplicate.
The music industry hardly condones the practice. The Recording Industry
Association of America estimates it lost $300 million in sales last year
because of piracy, and it's clearly worried about the rise of digital
duplication technology and its potential consequences.
But tape traders don't think they deserve the industry's wrath. They draw a
clear distinction between themselves and bootleggers -- the former simply
record shows and trade them, while the latter record and sell. Tape traders
argue that they aren't copying studio recordings and thereby cheating
companies out of sales -- in fact, some contend, if anything they're
spurring sales of artists' work and giving them free publicity.
Tapers, Traders and Their Hosts
While tape traders don't pay for recordings, it's a hobby that isn't for
penny-pinchers or technophobes. Tapers spend a lot of money to buy high-end
equipment such as digital-audio-tape recorders -- much higher-quality
devices than standard analog-cassette recorders. A bargain-basement set-up
for taping live shows to DAT runs about $800 to $1,000, and many tapers
spend several times more for even better equipment.
Moreover, DAT taping isn't easy. Tapers spend time getting friendly with
sound engineers at their local clubs so they can figure out the best
position from which to tape or -- if they're lucky -- get the engineer to
patch them straight into sound system's mixing board. One taper I know
spent roughly $5,000 on two tiny microphones that he clips to the left and
right arms of his horn-rimmed glasses; with them, he surreptitiously tapes
every show he ever attends to DAT. (The taper in question is revered in
alternative-country circles for owning a recording of every show ever
performed by Uncle Tupelo, the genre's late, lamented pioneer.)
Those tapers trade with each other and with the much larger numbers of
people who don't tape themselves, but who eagerly trade any shows they can
get their hands on.
Then there are the guardians of tape trading's new outposts on the Internet.
Steve Zimmerman, 34 years old, is the Webmaster of the Tape Trader Network,
a Web site based in Marin County, Calif., that brings together concert
lovers of every ilk. While Mr. Zimmerman doesn't organize or arrange trades
of live shows, his network lets fans of everyone from A Tribe Called Quest
to ZZ Top advertise their e-mail addresses and the bands they want to
trade, and the site often provides links to personal home pages that
contain lists of recordings the owner is willing to trade.
Mr. Zimmerman got started when he designed a piece of database software
called Tape Tracker, which lets concert lovers catalog the date, venue and
location of their prize shows, as well as listings of the songs played at
those shows. (The more ardent traders' need for such software isn't just
neurosis -- some of them own thousands of hours of live recordings.)
He launched his Web site to distribute Tape Tracker, and then decided to do
more for the taping community. "I started out doing Tape Tracker and
realized that were a lot of people out there who needed something to help
them meet each other." As of last Friday, Mr. Zimmerman's Tape Trader
Network had a total of 3,941 traders swapping tapes by 2,821 different
artists; in September, the site received a total of 256,400 page requests.
Mr. Zimmerman is far from alone: There are Web sites such as
Tapetrading.com and Tapetrader.com and a host of individual home pages
listing personal collections, as well as chat rooms, message boards, Usenet
newsgroups and e-mail lists devoted to individual bands -- all frequented
by enthusiasts trading tapes.
Most traders swap analog cassettes, but some -- particularly people who
actually tape shows -- trade DAT clones. (Because DATs are digital
recordings, copies are perfect duplicates, without the unavoidable loss of
sound quality that comes with each generation of analog dubbing.) And
increasingly, tapers are starting to copy tapes to recordable CDs, or
CD-Rs, using both computers and home-recording devices that can record CD-Rs.
Traders' Tales
Matt Kinsella, 32, who asked to be identified only as a Nebraska native,
estimates he's been at the tape-trading game for about 10 years, getting
his start in the analog world with some friends who had some Grateful Dead
bootlegs.
"The Internet has opened up a whole new world for me," Mr. Kinsella says.
"I've met and traded with so many cool people, and I've gotten into a bunch
of new bands that I probably wouldn't know otherwise."
Mr. Kinsella doesn't visit Web pages to make trades, though he said he's
considered it in the past. For him, other Internet byways are enough. "I'm
really busy enough doing trades with people I meet on newsgroups and
mailing lists," he says.
While Mr. Kinsella is a veteran, 14-year-old Dan Herman represents the
other end of the spectrum. While he's only been swapping tapes for a few
months, he's managed to build up a collection of roughly 30 live shows. He
says that he gets a lot of his recordings by approaching tapers at shows he
attends and giving them his e-mail address, though he's also posted his
name and wants on the Tape Trader Network, Tapetrading.com and Tapetrader.com.
Mr. Herman, who lives outside of Minneapolis, likes to trade tapes by the
Grateful Dead and the Big Wu, among others. Without the Net, he says, his
tape-trading activities would be severely curtailed.
"Well, if anything, it would just be the shows I had gone to," he says. "If
it wasn't for the Internet, I probably wouldn't have done this at all."
Mr. Herman says he doesn't tape shows himself, but adds that if he could
afford the equipment, he probably would.
A Wolf at the Door?
Either way, in many cases he's breaking the law. That's the opinion of Lisa
Cristal, an attorney with Fish & Neave in Manhattan.
The trading of tapes -- unless they're tapes of bands such as the Grateful
Dead or Phish, both of which encourage taping and even facilitate it by
setting up "tapers' areas" for audience members with standing microphones
-- is probably illegal, and recording certainly is, Ms. Cristal says.
"Even if you're exchanging them, you're exchanging something that's illegal
to begin with," she says. "If you're copying without permission, then there
are copyright issues, too." And, she adds, songwriters' royalty rights are
probably being impinged upon by the distribution of their music without
authorization.
Mr. Zimmerman is somewhat concerned that the recording industry may one day
come calling, as it has with the Online Guitar Archive and a Diamond
Multimedia Systems, a maker of multimedia hardware for computers. In June
the Harry Fox Agency, which represents a large portion of the U.S.
recording industry for the National Music Publishers' Association, filed a
lawsuit against the Online Guitar Archive, a database of guitar tablatures,
alleging that making them available violated copyrights and reduced
sheet-music sales. (The suit is pending.)
And just last Friday, the Recording Industry Association of America filed a
lawsuit against Diamond for selling a hand-held device called a Rio, which
can store and playback music transferred from a computer, arguing that the
Rio supports piracy on the Internet. (RIAA officials couldn't be reached
for this article.)
Mr. Zimmerman, for one, says he wants no part of traders looking for seed
material to sell as bootlegs, accusing them of "jeopardizing the whole
culture of people who like to trade tapes" and adds that he would try to
stop anyone using the Tape Trader Network for those ends.
"If someone were known to be doing that kind of thing, I would gladly post
their name on the Tape Trader Network so that people would know about them,
and I would strongly encourage people not to have anything to do with
them," he says.
Mr. Herman agrees, and thinks that most traders feel similarly. "I don't
sell tapes, and anyone who does sell tapes I won't trade with, because I
don't think that's right," he says. "If you're going to make money off of
other people's work, then I don't want to have anything to do with it."
If anything, Mr. Zimmerman suggests, record companies might see tape
traders as a blessing. Since no one is making a profit off of these trades,
and listeners often trade for a band they don't know very well or haven't
seen, he contends that the entire tape-trading community could be viewed as
a giant, free advertising campaign.
"My feeling is that in the long run it benefits the artists," he says.
"Where's the crime in a streak of bad luck" -- Jay Farrar