Thanks for all the responses - great input as always -
I wanted to make a couple things clear in reading some of the responses about what we were thinking -
- This would be totally optional for the taper and the leecher - niether side has to participate
- It would be a voluntary contribution only after the show is taped & seeded & again purely optional on both sides, not paying someone to tape for you
**Ultimately, we're trying to figure out the best way to do tapers a solid and encourage more tapers to seed online - any thoughts?**
It doesn't matter if it's optional on either end,
it's the wrong thing to do. Anytime you offer cash in exchange for taping, it undermines the "hobby" argument that we all use to justify out sport to skeptical performers. A cash transfer is never going to be defendable as a friend offering a ticket or another fan buying beers. I think that overtly doing this has a greater chance of doing harm to the community than doing good.
If you want to encourage tapers to offer up the goods, offer to provide blockers, seat swaps for sweet spot, and mostly offers to do the transfer and tracking work. I have about 120 hrs of recent masters sitting on my desk awaiting transfer and tracking. I don't have time to do them. Out of those, the only recording of mine to make it onto a download site is the xmasjam because the guy patched out of me was kind enough to convert and track it all.
If you guys could come up with a way to offer that service, I think that would help a great deal in general. I wouldn't even mind transferring to raw files if I could send them to someone who would return them tracked and flaced. But I would not participate if I knew that money was changing hands as part of the deal.
Set up a site where people who are otherwise attending a show can offer up their seats in the sweet spot in exchange for the ticket that the taper got in a bad position. I can't count the times I've taped from the section simply because I could not get a decent seat up close.