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And that’s just the range of positions on the matter of taping. Move over to what can be done with the recordings and you’ve opened up a whole new can of worms, particularly once we moved from the days of sending tapes and CDs through the mail to electronic distribution over the internet.

Given my location and the extremely unlikely possibility that I’d be able to catch many of the artists I was listening to live, it probably comes as no surprise to learn I was soon building up a collection of unofficial recordings.

Which brings me to the next point. I quickly learned that not only had I landed in the middle of a crowd of music freaks, but that it was a generous and well-organised crowd. For a start there were a number of people who were willing to help a fan who had nothing much to trade by offering B&P or blanks and postage. You sent an appropriate number of blank tapes, along with something to cover the cost of return postage and whoever made the offer would record the tapes for you and send them back. 

That was a bit tricky when it came to international postage, and the standard workaround was to throw in a couple of extra tapes in lieu of currency, stamps or whatever, but I found myself adding a few other items to packages. Back before Amazon and its cohorts became the international behemoths we know today there were albums released in Australia that were difficult to track down elsewhere, and an Australia-only CD was often ran acceptable substitute, and there was one bloke in (I think) Canada who was a big Paul Kelly fan, so...

Through these discussions, I should stress, there was a consensus that if there was going to be money involved at all - usually &P referred to providing a padded mailer and stamps to the appropriate value rather than currency - it should only be enough to cover the actual costs involved and no one should be seen to be profiting financially.

Once I’d started to build my collection I tried to be generous when I ran across people starting out since some very generous people helped me get started. Much of that generosity was shown in the formal setting of a tape tree - an entity that is now, more’s the pity in this wonderful new digital world, more or less extinct.

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© Ian Hughes 2015