Hyperlinked Tape-Trading Communities

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Example

Grateful Dead Tape-Trading Communities

How Grateful Dead Fans Communicate Through Handwritten Tape Lists and Hyperlinked Tape-Trading Communities

Katie Harvey:

" Recording technology provided an opportunity to preserve live music and transform it into a tangible, exchangeable object. Among Grateful Dead fans in particular, these musical artifacts instigated a community of tapers and tape traders who performed a specific type of fandom through the circulation of recordings. These fans produced and shared tape lists alongside the recordings that qualified and advertised personal collections. Technological development brought changes to the form, thus transforming the list from hand-written notes to hyperlinked networks. With this transformation, the lists became public and interconnected. Meanwhile (re)digitization techniques multiplied the number of circulating recordings and further complicated the exchange process, necessitating a naming standard and a communal list. Through the list, collectors demonstrate knowledge and state opinions, define fandom, and reveal and hide collections. The lists themselves contain the history and the future of this community.

Grateful Dead, the band, and Grateful Dead Productions, the company, supported tape trade, at first unofficially through non-regulation, and later officially through the inception of a taper’s section at concerts and a statement sanctioning non-commercial trade among fans. The music industry, however, has been known to fight against this type of informal fan circulation of recordings, often chasing it with updates to copyright law. Yet sociologist Lee Marshall argues that tape collectors “actually provide ideological support for the recording industry, helping valorize musical commodities”; he thus credits unofficial recordings as enhancements to the industry and the dialogue surrounding it.1 Dead Head tape activity, in particular, proved not only to augment official releases, but also to increase the fan base by extending the concert experience beyond the venues and into the everyday lives of fans. In turn, the tape lists extended the discourse by initiating new relationships and offering an additional space to discuss the music. An examination of tape lists, old and new, provides insight into the specialized knowledge of fans and how they communicate that knowledge to one another." (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/tne/pieces/lists-fandom-lists-knowledge)