It was the stinginess of the fans, and the pressure on the new fans to need to have rare shit in order to get rare shit that started a few of them on paths of deception.
The intense trading scene caused a lot of the more clever and sound tech savvy fans to make fake "full band roulette" demos, "live" versions of Shimmy' et al. It also caused some fans to start making big deals out of shit that really didn't matter either. I remember some guy PMing me a long time ago wanting to trade a RARE promo version of "Attack" that ran for 3:05 instead of 3:06. Are you fucking kidding me?
I mean, granted, I can understand the desire to want to keep something you have to yourself and your close friends. Especially if you payed exorbitant amounts of money for it. when I first got Demo tape 4, I think i dropped something like 60 or 70 bucks for it, and I didn't wanna share that shit with ANYONE... now look! EVERYONE HAS IT!
And I honestly couldn't be happier now that these demos are well known and shared among the fanbase.After I got burned out trading System stuff, i went to other band's forums. The Rammstein and Marilyn Manson fans just GIVE eachother shit! Within a few weeks of being part of the old Heirophant board, i had the entire Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids collection, even the Satan on Fire side project and the Answering Machine Tapes! nothing is rare over there anymore because of how freely they trade their shit. Even when MORE old demos from Manson's early days leaked just last year the fan who found them put them on youtube freely!
The sad flipside to this attitude is the Lady Gaga fanbase
That woman has dozens of tracks she wrote and recorded prior to her blowing up, and dozens more she writes even now and never officially releases. You would not believe the bullshit the fans had to go through in order to get most of them at first.
On the boards, I keep hearing about this guy "Burim", who is supposedly some kind of industry insider, or at least has access to one. When he got ahold of the first batch of Gaga demos (the "Team Love Child" demos, as they are known), he was SELLING them to the fans for 400 bucks or MORE! PER TRACK! In REAL money! Can you imagine anything else so ludicrous? Can you imagine if someone dropped $8000 to get the damn Toxicity demos?
Thankfully, other bootleggers got to work getting these tracks to the public, so nowadays you can find a lot of them pretty easily, (some of them remain lost however). But the really sad part is that Burim actually DID swindle lots of fans into paying hundreds of dollars for mp3's. Even worse, he left audio tags IN THE FILES saying dumb shit like "yo dawg! this is a Burim exclusive! For more, go to www.asshat.com! and YOU CAN'T TAKE THEM OUT! The most popular versions of these songs on youtube will ALWAYS have that annoying tag playing in the first chorus! Many of them you can't a version WITHOUT the tag! what a fucker! I am really glad none of the System fanbase ever resorted to anything so ridiculous.
So yeah... those are my thoughts on the sharing of rare tracks. before you demand any kind of trade from someone, always remember that this shit's gonna be everywhere eventually. Best not to be greedy. Karma and all that.
