I have not made clear yet that I am not a professional, I initially started this blog just because I love the genre(s) so much, those being mostly 90’s/early 00’s R&B and Hip-Hop.
I think I started doing this back around 2010 when I started this blog.
Initially I ofcourse started contacting similar people on blogs with stuff I didn’t have and offered my own cd’s for trade. This wasn’t always easy because the people I contacted then were already what you now call ‘elite’ in the sense that they had stuff almost nobody had.
It was very difficult to get in the good graces of said people because even when I offered multiple rips for 1 of their rare rips they would most of the time find a way to tell me “no thank you”. That only inspired me to buy even more stuff from online auctions/music websites like Ebay or Musicstack back then.
Then in the following years I got to know some people that were like the above “elite” and they were kind enough to make reasonable trades with me.
All fine and all good.
Then at about 2014/2015 you would see people asking on my blog (and others) to send them stuff for free. Then if you’d explain that you invested a lot of money to get your collection to where it currently is, they would always get mad. “It’s just files, let the music be free”.
I would always use the rhetoric “so I have to pay my money to send stuff to you for free. And you didn’t do anything for it”.
I never got a proper response to that question.
And now it’s 2025, I have met a lot of great people along the way with similar interests in music. The best guy is someone from London who I only know through the net, but never met in real life. You know who you are, you did a lot for me and I owe you so much for all the rare music you shared with me.
And this is also the time to call it quits. I have more important tasks in life to deal with and the love for the music (even the rarest of rare) has quite diminished over the years. I can’t even crack a smile for a CD that goes on discogs for $500 or something.
For all the people I have dealt with, thank you it was a pleasure.
