How did tape trading work?
By Scott Keith on September 21, 2020
I was reading about your Memphis tape trading and realized that I hear about tape trading all the time, but nobody goes into much detail about specifics. I guess it went on during my early fandom but I must have just completely missed the boat.
How would one have gone about the process of trading tapes with other fans? Was it just something that was conducted over (showing my age) forums like rspw and Prodigy or AOL and people posted what was in their collections? Did you just dub tapes and send them off or could you just keep passing those tapes along? Were there other unwritten rules? How did you originally get involved in it?
You got most of the details right. I had 2 VCRs connected together and I’d dub copies of tapes and send them off. People would post lists of available stuff via email lists or forums, but it dates back to the 70s via newsletters. I had a lot of ECW through my roommate so that was my primary currency, but if you were just starting you’d usually need to buy tapes from people as seed stock. I ended up making a compilation called Netcop Busts, kind of a precursor to Wrestlecrap, that did really well.
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