The first ever NIRVANA conference was held in Oxford, UK in March 2002. One of the events was a lucid speech by Benoit Martigny delineating the structure of the internatinoal trading community, and suggesting what strategies would be most time-effective when hunting for unsurfaced material. All who were present were honored to witness such a clear exposition of the mechanics of trading. A diagrammatic summary is presented below for your interest.

The Nirvana Trading History

• Original bootlegs
• Old degenerated tapes that survived among the nirvana fans community
• Newly found recordings

We (in the internet community) often did not know where the shows or uppgrades were surfacing from.

Today, we know what is this deep underground entity. It turns up to be a gigantic trading and taping network. By far, unbelievably more efficient than what we can find on the net. This underground network is really dense. So compact than it can cover all the concert from all the venues from all the time!

In this network, each link of the chain is very close to another one in space.

To comprehend how works this network, we can see how 2 links of the chain are working together.

Around a venue, or a local music festival, tapers record every single show by EVERY band, whether they like them or not. They organize themselves in order to be able to offer for trading a lot of bands in ana1 or master clone.

So a taper is able to get every single band who played in his local area by trading with his local friends tapers.

That way, this taper is able to offer recordings from nearly ANY band recorded in his area. When he wants to trade for recordings by his favourite band taped by others, he therefore has a lot of material he can offer, and the taper of the concert he wants to obtain will be able to find recordings by his favourite bands on the other trader's list. A deal can therefore be done.

Now the question is: How do this local tapers maanage to extand their trading area?

Those 2 guys are trading their adresses book ! so the guy in Paris will be able to reach any tapers from Rennes.

So mainly they enter in contact by trading adresses books. Some of those traders have more than 3 000 references (3 000 tapers adresses) and more than 3 000 tapes in their list. They just need to know where their fav band played and that's it.

This how it works and it explains why those tape trades have so many low gen (ana1 or ana2 at the max).

This network is still active, and some of those traders are more than 40 years old. Needless to say than getting a 3 000 references adresses book is like finding GOLD. But this is what we need.

1. We need to get hold of a big references list. (3 000 taper references could help!)
2. We must be able to offer something in return to get the Nirvana shows we want + to build or get a good references book.

1. We should try to get as many contact details of underground traders as possible - (Do remember than those traders may still be active. We may have to achieve this by doing a trade where we send CDRs and get references in exchange.)
2. However, the underground traders will only want to trade with us if we have something to offer.
3. So we must record as many shows as possible so that we can have something to offer in exchange.
4. If we, the Nirvana Community, coordinate our taping as much as possible, by pooling our master lists, then this will help us to find suitable material for trade.

Please, do note that: In my experience, this is BY FAR the most efficient use of our time; writing speculative letters or contacting radio stations or journalists is considerably less likely to yield results.