Well you were a bootlegger who sold tapes. A tape trader is someone who trades tapes for another tape.coffeepotman wrote:When I first moved to NY in 1988 I was a "bootlegger" or "tape trader", more like a bootlegger but really neither. I would go to shows and record them with a pretty high quality (for those days) Sony tape recorder and then sell the tapes on St. Marks Place, usually within a couple of days. I had a partner who had a business doing that. St Marks Place back then was full of book sellers and junk sellers and boutiques and record stores. Not the Yuppieville it is now. I was in a stand right next to Trash and Vaudeville. If any band came by, which there were many, and objected most were cool and we just stopped selling their tapes. I got to meet a lot of my rock star heroes back then by doing this. Now what happened to my tapes after they were sold I had no control of and I know that my recording to Sonic Youth at Central Park was made into a CD and sold for usually 20-25$ at record stores. One of my recordings of Johnny Thunders was also made into a CD and sold elsewhere. Does that make me evil or just spreading the love and making some chump change.
Evil, I don't know about that. With respects if you were only in it for as you say "spreading the love" then you would've been swapping tapes with friends or giving them away freely. But you were selling them for a profit however big however small. Your tape may well have been re-used to make a CD boot but what's the difference other than price, none as far as I can see. Now you were not forcing anyone to buy your tapes and I expect you like many other tape sellers had a tape deck so people could listen to what they were buying before parting with their money.
I bought many so called "bootleg tapes" back in the day and the first thing I did was to pirate that and give my friends copies so they didn't have to pay for it. This of course is where the 2nd/3rd generation tapes come from. With the advent of CD and a decent original source then CD copies are nowhere near as bad as tapes were for killing the sound quality. But when someone takes poor quality Mp3's and tries to pass them off as "great sounding" then this is evil. My main argument would be that you were filling a gap in the market and there is always a market for this stuff. How much you cared about what you were selling and to what quality control you would have only you would know.
My main problem with Chuck looking on eBay for a copy of the T.R.A.C. files is that they are already here in a listenable quality and with artwork that I took some time and care with. You're already getting these files for free and as this is a forum for the musician who made this music we should at least show him some respect. Especially as he has been extremely generous when it comes to sharing his music. I don't want to see some wanker putting out a CDr of these files with artwork I made to be shared with this community freely just so he can make a couple of £££ or $$$ on eBay.