The tape network was not a quaint forerunner of the internet. It was the industry. For four years it was the only industry this music had, and it picked winners with more accuracy than most of the labels that came after it, because the people running it were the same people making the records and they had no reason to be polite about anything.
Here is the mechanism, since almost nobody writes it down properly. A genre with no shops, no radio and no press built its own circulatory system out of padded envelopes, and for the first four years everything the music had went through it: the songs, the reputations, the signings and the arguments. That is the infrastructure sitting under the first four years, and it worked like this.
How you got the address
Nobody had a directory. What existed instead were three sources, and all three were paper. The first was the fanzine, photocopied at somebody's workplace at night and posted out in runs of a few hundred, carrying interviews, demo reviews and pages of contact addresses. Metal Forces, started by Bernard Doe in Stevenage in August 1983, ran a demo column called Demolition that put unsigned bands in front of readers on two continents. Jon Kristiansen began Slayer in Sarpsborg in 1985 and kept it running through twenty issues to 2010, and for most of the eighties it was the closest thing the Scandinavian underground had to a register of who existed.
The second source was the sleeve itself. Every demo insert carried a thanks list, and a thanks list is a directory of everybody that band was already trading with. Work through three of them and you had thirty addresses, most of which would answer. The third was the flyer, a quarter of a photocopied A4 sheet stuffed into every outgoing envelope, advertising somebody else's tape and carrying their address at the bottom. Every parcel that went out was also an advertisement for two other bands.
What a trade actually cost
The etiquette was simple and it was enforced. You wrote a letter, enclosed your own trade list, which was a typed or handwritten inventory of everything you held with band, title and year, and proposed a swap. C-60 and C-90 blanks were the currency, TDK and Maxell preferred because the cheap tapes shed oxide and took the top end off. A ninety minute cassette carried two demos and a live set, so the marginal cost of adding a band nobody asked for was nothing, and that is precisely how bands from countries with no scene got heard: as filler on the back half of somebody else's trade.
Overseas the postage was the hard part. You could not enclose foreign stamps, so traders sent international reply coupons bought at the post office, or folded cash into a piece of card so a customs officer holding the envelope to a light would see nothing. Three weeks each way was normal and six was not unusual. A band in Poland or Brazil had to build every relationship at that speed, and they built them anyway.
Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?
Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener
The rules, and what breaking them cost
The whole thing ran on nothing but reputation, since both sides posted into the dark and neither had any recourse. Somebody who took a package and sent nothing back became a rip-off trader, and that phrase got printed. Fanzines named them. Other traders stopped answering their letters. In a network of a few thousand people spread over twenty countries, being named twice was the end of your correspondence, and there was no second account to open.
Every parcel that went out was also an advertisement for two other bands.
The upside of the same mechanism is that a thanks list functioned as a credit rating. A demo whose insert thanked forty traders in nine countries told a label something no press release could: this band already has a distribution network and it did not cost anybody a penny to build.
Generation loss, and what it did to the records
Analogue copying is lossy and it is lossy in one direction. Every dub takes off high frequencies and adds hiss, so a fourth generation cassette is a wash of cymbal and distortion with a shape somewhere underneath it. Nobody in Europe in 1986 was hearing a first generation copy of anything American. They were hearing an artefact.
That matters more than it sounds, because bands were copying what they heard. The murk that Scandinavian bands were reaching for at the end of the decade was partly a deliberate aesthetic and partly an accurate reproduction of what a Florida demo sounded like after four passes through somebody's dual deck. Producers then started building it in on purpose. An accident in the postal system became a production choice, and forty years later people pay money for reissues that replicate it.
The labels were on the same mailing list
This is the part that gets left out of the romantic version. The network was never separate from the business, because the people who started the labels were traders first. Digby Pearson was running correspondence and mail order out of a bedroom in Nottingham before Earache had a catalogue. Brian Slagel had been compiling unsigned bands onto Metal Massacre volumes since 1982. Borivoj Krgin wrote for Metal Forces, traded tapes out of the New York area and went on to a career signing bands. When a label heard a demo in 1987 it was because it was on the same list as everybody else.
Which explains the strangest fact about the period, the one covered at length in the piece on the tapes themselves: Massacre sustained an international reputation for five years on two demos, and Earache signed them at the end of it. No touring outside the state, no album, no press campaign. The envelopes did all of it.
How it ended, and what replaced it
Three things killed it, in order. The compact disc arrived in the underground around 1990 and would not dub without a deck most people did not own, so the format that had made copying free stopped being the default. Then the mail order distros professionalised: a printed catalogue, an order form, a price in three currencies, and suddenly you could buy the thing rather than beg a copy of it. By 1993 the same music was on a shelf in a shop in eleven countries, and the reason to write to a stranger in Enschede had gone.
The internet finished it off, and it did so twice, first with newsgroups and email lists in the mid nineties and then with file sharing at the end of the decade. What went with it was not the music, which is more available now than it has ever been. What went was the filter. A trade took three weeks and cost real money, which meant somebody had vouched for the tape before it moved, and a band with nothing got nowhere. Frictionless distribution removed the vouching along with the friction.
The residue is everywhere if you know where to look. The hand folded photocopied insert, the logo drawn with a Rotring pen at a kitchen table, the thanks list running down the back page: those objects were made to survive a photocopier and a postal sorting machine, and their design language is the direct ancestor of death metal album art. The music the envelopes carried had ancestors of its own, records made years earlier by bands who had no idea what they were supplying, and those are proto Death Metal.
