I'm heartened that so much tape is still around. The lot of digital is often binary - it exists or it doesn't, but even a shred of flaking analog media can retain complete information.

I was a member of a few tape sharing communities at the turn of the millennium and spent those years digitizing scores of board and bootleg live recordings (APE or FLAC... the great debate). We'd trade our strategies for getting gear into shows, who was working door and board and was cool with what, stories of getting caught. When recorders got small enough, we started sneaking MiniDisc players into venues with microphones down our sleeves for stereo. I've still got a few stacks of those.

Leading up to that, at the dawn of LAME, I was doing the same over on IRC. Everyone with an fserve had a few tracks or albums of their favorite bands, tons local with no other distribution, and you could always message them for more info. There was a lot of love, and I found a lot of great people across the world that way.

When the RIAA crackdowns started, I archived as much as I could but lost everything in the mid-2000s when a Windows upgrade overwrote my external storage. The irony that hundreds of gigs (of both kids) would have survived if I'd put them on tape hasn't eluded me.