Blanks & Postage...

If you get pissed when itunes wont click/buy because your credit card info needs to be updated or aggravated when you can’t find the charger to your mp3 player, you’ll probably want to skip this post.

About 10 years ago, I was part of an online community of music fans (rec.music.phish) and we traded music with one another through meeting on message boards. Rec.music.phish is how I came to know about this, but heads corresponded with one another through the mail, through community newspapers, and through classified ads for years before the ease of the internet brought more music to our ears than we could ever listen to.

Fans- often tapers, who spent tons of time and money to meticulously tape live shows, would offer copies of a show on a message board, and take the first 1 or 3 or 5 respondents.

For the cost of B&P or Blanks and Postage, I would snail mail the generous taper blank media.

They would wait for the packages in the mail (sometimes up to a week depending on what coast they were on) tape or burn the requested show, and return to the sender, usually with a little note about the show. Sometimes the tape covers were decorated, sometime the cdr’s had fancy labels, but regardless - new music was the most exciting part of the week.

Ten years later, I can listen to almost anything, at anytime for free. More often than not, I pick through my play list on itunes and rely on the buffering stream of dozens of stations, but every once in a while, I have a nostalgic urge for the muffled quality of an old fashioned cassette tape. Maxell cassettes, wooden cassette tape holder makers, those padded manila package people, and the USPS are all way sad to see cassette tapes go the way of the Laserdisc.