TweeNet Tape Swap
The Indiepop Mailing List tape swaps go all the way back to October 1994, just after the list had started.The idea is to compile a bunch of songs, put them on a mix-tape and send it to a fellow list-member. Postage is the responsibility of the sender, and an international rate may be required.
While the definition of indie-pop differs from person to person, if you focus on making your offering entertaining and educational you shouldn't receive any complaints.
In the past Brian Gray and Keith Sawyer would manually match up interesting people, but somehow this stopped in 2005. This latest version works slightly different:
- Any visitor to www.twee.net may participate in the swap, it is not restricted to list members.
- In the past you would receive two names, one to send a tape to and another one to receive one from. The main reason was that this way even with an odd number of participants, we could always include everybody in the swap. For now we change this, so you only have to deal with one other person, you send to and receive from him or her.
- It all started with cassettes and in the late 90s we added CDRs, now it also makes sense to swap Zip files with up to 20 songs and just make them available somewhere for download or even email them. We know this takes a bit of the excitement away from the swap but also makes it much easier for people and cheaper too.
- In the past you had to sign up for swap every month. Now you become a permanent tape swapper. Rather than sending an email to a person, you update your profile in the TweeNet Indiepop Directory If you don't already have an entry in the directory you can just create one.
- You have the choice between participating every month, or only in certain months down to just once a year.
- You can state your preferred format (cassette, CDR or file) and the system will first try to match you up with a partner with the same preferred format. If no-one can be found you will be matched up against someone with a different format. If you don't want to swap with someone with a different format, just let them know.
- If you are unlucky you may be the last person on the list and we can't find a partner for you. The system tries to favour people who missed out in previous months when assigning partners.
- This is a fully automated system and no human is involved in this but I hope it works just as well
- The system will not assign the same partners to each other twice, at some point in the feature we may runs out of possible pairs, the more people participate the better.
We plan to start this in August or September 2007, but you can already sign up.
Here's how many people are currently doing the tape swap:
| CD-Rom | 2 |
| Online file swap | 1 |