[The Sixth Rat Packer]

You know I'm sort of conflicted on this. On the one hand, I don't think people should be selling shows. Point blank. I think that live shows should be shared by people to get them out to the fans and all that.

But what do you do when you stumble across someone who's selling some shows (if trades aren't able to be done, and they don't do B+P) who has shows that A. you've never seen before, and didn't even know were out there and B. you can't find anywhere else.

Do you give in and cop the shows figuring that as long as you can get them and then spread them through the community that it'll be okay?

Let me explain the situation.

Years back when I FIRST got into tapetrading, I found this guy's webpage through tapetrader.com. He's based in Japan. So he has a MASSIVE list of shows. I mean, excuse the expression, an absolute fuckload of shows. And I'm talking about R&B, funk, soul shows. Now as most of you are aware of, there doesn't seem to be a huge contingent of sharers that have soul/R&B/Hip Hop/Funk type shows.

I mean there are some out there, but not even remotely close to the jam bands or the rock stuff or whatever.

So I went through his list and he had a handful of shows that I was just drooling over.

So I contacted him and was like, "look, I just got into this whole thing and I don't have a whole LOT of shows, but take a look at what I have and let's see if we can work something out. At worst, I can send you some blank dvds and postage."

He responded and said that he didn't do B+P and he didn't see anything I had that he wanted, and that he would charge me 5 bucks per CDR or 10 bucks per DVDR.

My initial reaction was (although I didn't respond to him in this way) "yeah, fuck YOU"

I responded that I appreciated him responding to me, but I wasn't really feeling the paying for boots thing.

And for some reason I ended up on his mailing list. lol

So flash forward to about a month ago and I got an email in an old email account I used from him that was a mass emailing kinda thing to all the people I suppose he deals with, saying the page was updated.

So I just went and looked through and there were still the shows I wanted and there were a couple more.

Now by this time I've been trading awhile and I've gotten some of the shows but there's still shows on there that I've never seen before didn't even know there were copies out there.

And so I hit him up and was like "check my list, blah blah blah" left off the B+P thing.

So he came back and said he had the stuff of interest on mine that he would have liked, and quoted me the prices.

This time I sat there and thought about it. I had some paypal dough laying around, and so I swallowed my pride and sent him like..38 bucks for the four dvds I wanted. He wanted 40 and I was like "dude, I got like 38.23..." lol

And that wasn't a lie.

So he was like, that's cool, go ahead.

So I paid him weekend and he shipped them this past monday. Got them today.

They're FANTASTIC.

One of the shows has a "do not sell this show" thing on it which kinda made me laugh. Authored by D.K.M. (says don't walk on the grass) lol

But I plan to upload the shows to here.

So my question is this, and I apologize for how long this is going:

Do you make excuses and pay for something if it's not available elsewhere, so you can then spread it around to others who might want it?

I mean, the dude was super polite, he's never been rude, never been ...anything but the perfect person to deal with, aside from him selling boots.

I saw a post while trying to find his page onetime from him on this forum, but it was way back in 2005 or something.

Just wondering....