What happens when a culture dies out, do people notice, do people care? If it occurs by mass destruction eradicating the people of the culture then people take note, but when assimilation into a new culture or a new phase takes over, that past culture is left forgotten, a piece of memory not to be engaged.
I love music. I consume music in every aspect, so much so that I decided to do my graduate dissertation in archaeology, yes archaeology in tracking the material subculture known as concert trading, more specifically the B&P-blanks and postage.
This culture had rules you followed, hierarchy, leaders, a structure of governing. Although  this culture was dispersed geographically, it held all the hallmarks of being a culture, a religion, a border free country into itself. Now it’s just an anachronism, like the 8 track, a way music was consumed before. However, it wasn’t just the death of a technology with previous musical evolutions, it was the death of a culture. Now iphones, filesharing via sendspace or hulkshare - the community has been removed, the content provided at a lower quality and the expectations of it also so.
The  complex trading community had a structure and rules:
 I want these shows, so I’ll trade you my brand new show for that one.
This artist doesn't allow taping, so we won't allow his/her shows to be on any public forum.
 Even the amount of time, two weeks, was dictated before it was considered polite to ask for a show that had been taped.
Converting shows to a lossie format is poor form.
I'm new and I don't have anything to share, but I'll send you blank discs and postage if you'd be so kind to share.
What happened if you broke the rules, your peers chastised you for your petulance at disrespecting your elders and not conforming to the rules. You could be branded a bad trader and banned from communities, your handle taken note of. If you didn’t formulate your package for a B&P exactly, your disks could be confiscated and the return of a free show not given at all.
In some senses there was the utopian ideal to keep music free and make it listenable. Part of it felt like everyone was breaking the rules, but at the same time, the people who were in this community were also the ones going multiple concerts and buying full albums as soon as they hit the shelves.Â
The shift happened as soon as mobile recording started to become easier and more public forums were taking on these concerts. Fans who used to compare the versions of songs from nights were now the ones getting angry that the same songs and patter were being played night after night. There was this sense of entitlement to the artist giving the non-concert goers the best experience for themselves personally rather than just enjoying the music.Â
The shift wasn't immediate, torrents started of the shows built around these communities and forums, and then single song recordings started to be shared rather than the entire show itself. The recordings started to shift from high quality to iphone recordings and people started accepting the change in format. The online and taper communities started to shift and while it still remains for a few of the older bands, newer artists were never welcomed into this fold and in turn their fans never kept the momentum going.
The anthropological side of this is fascinating - you could see the birth of an online culture, a thriving period of civilization that had it coexisting with real life communities and people, and it's dissolution slowly into pockets of smaller older close knit "kin" making it on their own.
My thought is " What will history record of this culture?" No static place. No ruins of homes. No written constitutional legacy.  Just a few old unmarked disks or tapes, scattered across the world in no recognizable pattern, relics that will soon have no comprehensible meaning to anthropologists and archaeologists alike. The death of the traders is the death of a culture, and it raises the question how do we record and define community in a digital age.
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