When I was young, O so many decades ago, I would race home from school on certain afternoons to record freeform radios shows on community and college radio stations (WYEP and WRCT) that would occasionally play music that would change my life.
Punk had blown the doors open for me and my ears were (are) hungry for new sonic adventures. I would sit with my finger hovering over the "pause" button ready to twitch into record mode at the slightest aural stimulation. But this wasn't the killing that the record companies were warning us about.
Once I got a double well cassette deck, I could make mixed tapes for friends, they could make them for me, and we could then make request for more of THIS and less of THAT. We could easily fit two LPs and some bonus tracks on a 90 minute tape and this is exactly what we did and this was MURDER.
I was (am) a much bigger fan of a good mix than an entire LP. but even when records were cheap, I could never afford all that I "needed" nor was it easy to track down obscure or imported records in the pre-internet era. So, we had to kill.
Those of us who swapped (swap) tapes started to lose our trading partners to streaming and to overwhelming postal charges in the past decade or two. For me to ship a single cassette to England costs TWENTY DOLLARS! (under 8 oz: $20, 9 oz to 2 pounds, $30.45--so it is more cost effective to send a BUNCH of tapes) Sending a single burned CD is considerable cheaper as it is thin enough to travel as First Class mail.
I could go on for awhile, but will spare you...
I rambled on about all this because my pal T. Lehto sent me this great button that I wanted to share!
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