RECORDINGS ARE NOT FOR SALE!

Weeding

This is the most popular means of distributing individual recordings in trading groups, being far faster and versatile than a tree (even faster than individual trades) whilst remaining open to the whole trading community, unlike a one-to-one trade.

The procedure:

• Someone (the 'seeder') publicly offers a recording.
• People respond, in private.
• The seeder sends copies to a predetermined number of respondents (3-5), at his/her own expense. The recipients ('reweeders') send nothing in return; it's not a trade.
• When the discs arrive, each reweeder checks the recordings are pristine then makes multiple copies, publicly offers them to 3-5 further people, and sends them at his/her own expense. Hence, the reweeders didn't receive free recordings, they received a commitment to pass on perfect copies.
• The recipients of the reweeded copies then become reweeders themselves, making copies for others, who make copies for others, who....
• The process continues until everyone who wants a copy has a copy.

The initial offer

A person, the 'seeder' makes a public announcement that he/she is making a recording available. The announcement generally gives the core information of artist/band, date and location, plus a general description of the recording and show, including the tracklist, and noting any known flaws in the recording.
The seeder asks for a number of volunteers (typically three) to each receive a copy in return for a commitment to promptly pass further copies on to other members of the group. These are 'reweeders'. Anyone unable to make copies (i.e. those without CD-R writers), or unwilling to commit to doing so, need not respond. They will have an opportunity later in the weed.

By convention, three copies of the recording are offered at each stage of a weed, whether that's three individual discs or three 2-disc sets. Some offer five or even more copies, and that's to be welcomed, but it's been found that people are discouraged from participating at all if there's a perceived 'peer pressure' requirement to make lots of copies. Hence, a basic commitment to make three copies is generally considered best; anything over that is a bonus, but entirely voluntary.

Since some prefer to trade in CD Audio format, and others prefer to trade in .shn format, it is usual for the seeder to offer in both formats, or at least make provision for both formats to be made available from the next generation. It is obviously advantageous to make a master .shn copy as early in the process as possible. The seeder may therefore ask respondents to state which format they will be using when making further copies (reweeding).

The seeder may request further conditions, typically related to geographical distribution. That's the seeder's prerogative. Some state that respondents must make copies available to anywhere in the world; others prefer to restrict distribution to specific areas. A typical technique is to send one copy to Europe, one to North America, and a third copy to anywhere - Australia, South America or indeed another to Europe or N.America. Respondents may therefore be asked to state where they intend to reweed.

1. each post is sent to every member's mailbox, one at a time.
2. posts are stored for a few hours, then sent to members' mailboxes in compilations of multiple posts, called 'digests'.
3. members receive no e-mails, but visit the group website whenever is convenient, and read all posts since their last visit.

Responding

Having seen the initial announcement in a trading group, those interested then contact the seeder in private, expressing interest, stating acceptance of the commitment to pass on copies, and giving a postal address to which the recording needs to be sent. Key points to remember:

• Always reply in private, by e-mail; never by posting a public message to the trading group. Such postings, consequently received by every member of the group, needlessly take up bandwidth, are a security risk (do you really want hundreds of strangers to know where you live?), and are simply annoying. They're also pointless, as only off-list replies count, and public replies will be ignored.
• Remember to state a postal address when replying to a weed offer; it is not permitted to book a place, then send an address in a later e-mail. Replies without addresses are ignored.
• Be polite! Some people respond to weeds with just "Send to [address]." - no 'please' or even 'hello'. Somewhat rude; remember that the seeder is sending out recordings as a favour to the group; arrogant demands for copies are likely to be ignored.
• If the seeder has requested respondents to state their intended reweeding format or geographical region, do so. If the seeder is looking for a .shn reweeder, only responses clearly stating an intention to do that will be any use.
  If the seeder asks respondents to choose a format or region, do so. Never evade the issue by saying "any" or "whatever you need". A typical offer will receive plenty of responses meeting each of the requirements, so there's no need for respondents to be flexible. Rather, it's a considerable help when allocating copies if the respondents have clearly committed to a single option. Some seeders insist on this, and ignore vague responses, even if the sender thinks he/she is being helpful ('cos it's not!).

Allocation

The seeder then needs to allocate the available copies to those who have responded. The selection technique is entirely up to the seeder. Some seeders accept the first three responses received, or the first from the designated regions. Others keep the offer open for a designated period of time (typically 24 hours) and randomly select 'winners' from all responses received. Some favour reweeders with good reputations, known to be reliable. Some avoid respondents with unverifiable e-mail addresses (hotmail, yahoo!, etc.) as they may be false identities masking known bootleggers. Some are prejudiced against AOL members. Some dislike Texans. Whatever; it's the seeder's choice.

Closing the offer

Once the copies have been allocated, it is important for the seeder to publicly announce that the offer is closed, so there's no need for further people to respond.
If the offer carried certain conditions, the offer might be closed in stages; perhaps once all copies for Europe have been allocated, or all .shn copies. In such a case, the remaining parts of the offer remain open until a later announcement closes them.
A weed offer remains open until it has been closed. All too often, people assume that because an offer was made a few hours ago, it is bound to have been filled already, so don't bother to respond. Meanwhile, the person making the offer is wondering why so few people have responded! Whenever you see an offer that interests you, check all posts that have been made on-list since the offer was made. Unless one of those subsequent posts expressly closes the offer, please get in contact with the person making the offer.

The closing announcement generally takes the form:

• all places have been allocated; the offer is closed
• thanks to everyone who responded.
• the successful reweeders are: [names, countries]; look for a follow-up offer from each of them soon.

Sending copies

The seeder makes the required number of copies, checks they have no copying errors, places them in padded envelopes and posts them to the reweeders. As explained above, the recipients send nothing in return, and the sender bears all costs of the blank discs, envelopes and postage; this is a donation to the trading community, not a trade.

On receipt, each reweeder sends the seeder a quick e-mail thanking him/her for the recording and confirming it has arrived. Some like to listen to the recording first, to check it's flawless, but it's important to then send the confirmation e-mail to the sender. Apart from the common courtesy of expressing gratitude, it verifies that the disc(s) arrived safely, so if someone fails to reweed, the 'it never arrived' excuse is negated.

If the recording is found to be flawed at this stage, it must not be reweeded. Each reweeder has a responsibility to every future recipient of subsequent weed offers, to ensure that only flawless copies are passed on. The individual might feel it's 'good enough' for his or her own use, but that's irrelevant - the responsibility is to pass on perfectly pristine copies, so 'good enough' isn't good enough. If the recording is flawed, the sender is required to send a flawless replacement copy, again at his/her own expense. Anyone responding to a weed offer must be aware of this commitment from the outset. It is not in the sender's interests to rush the copying process or cut corners; if someone is unable or unwilling to devote the time and effort to make flawless copies, he/she should not be involved in the weed at all.

The seeder's role in the weed is then completed.

Reweeding

The cycle then repeats itself, almost exactly. Each reweeder publicly offers 3-5 copies to people willing to make further copies for others, and things proceed as above.

Note that if the reweeder received his/her copy on condition that he/she passes it on within a specific region or in a specific format, that commitment must be honoured. However, the reweeder doesn't necessarily have to pass that commitment on to the next generation of reweeders (though he/she may). For example, it is fairly common for a seeder to send a copy to someone in, say, Europe, on condition that he/she exclusively reweeds within Europe, but the reweeder can leave the next set of recipients free to send to, say, N.America if they wish. At each stage, the reweeder sets the conditions, without an obligation to pass on the seeder's preferred restrictions. In practice, the seeder's conditions are honoured for the life of the weed, so long as they're reasonable.

An exception is the format of the recording. It is vital to reweed only in the same format as was received; the reweeder doesn't get to choose, once the initial commitment has been made by responding to the previous person's offer.
If you want to reweed in .shn format, only respond to offers on the .shn side of a weed; never, ever obtain an audio format copy and make your own .shn disc for reweeding. If someone receives a third or fourth generation CD Audio copy of a weed, and decides to encode it to .shn, to reweed in that format, the .shn files are unlikely to be of the same guaranteed quality as .shn files encoded from the master recording.

Saturation

Assuming that a seed goes to each of three people, who each reweed to three people, twelve people will have copies of the original recording (3+9). The next generation adds a further 27, the generation after that a further 81. Also assuming that it takes a week to receive a copy, listen to it, reoffer and send to others, that means that within a month of the first offer, there could be 120 copies in circulation. One more week would raise that to 363 copies.

It's no surprise that efficiency is never that great; apart from time delays, there are two main limitations. One is defaulters: people who accept copies but fail to reweed, for various reasons. If this happens late in a weed, it's annoying, but doesn't really matter, as there are so many other branches able to fill the gap. If it happens in the earlier stages, it can be disastrous.
The second limitation is demand: after a short while, everyone who wants a copy and has the ability/inclination to pass on further copies already has a copy, so weed offers go unfilled; the weed is saturated.

Traditionally (but see below), at this point, 3-4 weeks after the launch of the weed, some branches can be allowed to 'die' - copies can go to those unable/unwilling to pass on further copies, typically those without CD-R burners. In making an offer, the reweeder specifies that one, occasionally two (but preferably not all three!) copies will go to the burnerless.

There doesn't seem to be a clear consensus on how to handle these 'dead-end' offers.
Some reweeders choose to send them as gifts, mirroring the generosity of the original seeder who provided the initial copies for no return whatsoever. This can be a good gesture to welcome new traders to the community, giving them the beginning of a collection usable in future trades. Other reweeders choose to treat the final offer as a b&p trade.

An increasingly common practice in many trading groups is to operate an 'Orphanage'. If a reweeder posts an offer and receives no responses, and receives the same non-response from a repeated offer, he/she can add the recording's details to a publicly-accessible database. Other members, perhaps new ones joining weeks or months after the last offer, can visit the Orphanage and contact the reweeder. The weed then restarts, and proceeds until interest diminishes and the recording returns to the Orphanage. Hence, a weed never dies by being sent to the burnerless, and remains in circulation forever.
This obviously means there are no longer opportunities for the burnerless to participate. However, CD-R burners have been basic, standard components of all new computers sold within the past few years, so it is reasonably safe to presume that anyone able to access a web-based CD-R trading group also has the means to copy CD-Rs.

Though this has been made available as a 'service to the trading community', please remember it is copyrighted, not in the public domain nor freely usable by other publications without express permission.