But rare older shows are jealously guarded by the paranoid collectors who want equal barter. It has taken me quite a long time to collect the mixes. Believe me, it is not easy. But he doesn't store mixes on his server, partly because they take up so much space, but also because it might be broken into. The trading resembles old-time tape traders, who swap live recordings of every band under the sun, but especially the Grateful Dead, Phish, String Cheese Incident and R.E.M. Like tape traders, electronica traders do not sell their recordings.
Transactions are strictly limited to trades, which tends to lock out outsiders.
These days Deadheads and fans of other jam bands also trade on recordable CDs, but mainly to maintain quality. The music is burned onto CD in uncompressed WAV format, which doesn't degrade music quality like a heavily compressed MP3. The quality isn't as good, it takes forever and you're always losing the connection. No one trades in analog tapes any more, Hassler said. Blank CDs are less expensive, better quality and make it easy to swap a lot of music at the same time.