ROB AND SHARON Shiner are the portrait of a well-adjusted, young, successful professional couple. He’s a doctor with a family practice; she works for a biotechnology firm in Woburn. Kids are not too far in the future. The Shiners’ bright third-floor apartment in Brookline is decorated in post-collegiate neo-hippie chic: Day-Glo concert posters dominate the walls; a stone carving of Buddha sits peacefully on a shelf; a miniature fountain gurgles soothingly in the corner. But where most couples would liven up their dining rooms with plants, pottery, or maybe a piece of sculpture, the Shiners display racks and racks of electronic recording gear and a collection of looming CD towers. For despite the trappings of middle-class yuppiedom, the Shiners are members of a strange subculture, with rituals, codes, and rules that would mystify the Masons: Rob and Sharon are tapers. Or, as Sharon jokes in an e-mail, Rob is the taper; she’s the " taper-wench. "

Tapers and their companion hobbyists, tape traders, form a subculture of music fans dedicated to the live-concert experience. Really dedicated. Not only do Rob and Sharon attend more than a hundred performances a year (recording a large percentage of them), but they have flown back and forth across the country and spent thousands of dollars pursuing their hobby. Live music is the soundtrack to their lives.

Contrary to what the media would have you think, music sharing didn’t begin with Napster. It originated in the tape-trading community. Unlike bootleggers, who sell illicit live recordings and rare studio outtakes, or CD pirates, who just hawk low-budget knockoffs of commercial releases, tapers share their recordings of live shows gratis; they make copies for friends, fellow collectors, and even complete strangers. Recordings are exchanged, but never sold: this is the cornerstone of the purist and staunchly anti-commercial taper philosophy, and the number-one rule of tape trading.

Now, as Napster begins to crumble under pressure from the recording industry, the tape-trading community continues to grow, free of the legal pressures that plague bootleggers, CD pirates, and online file traders. Bringing together the sonic fanaticism of audiophiles, the breathless promotion of fanzine scribblers, and the obsessive tendencies of archivists and museum curators, tapers see themselves as defenders of American music culture — collecting, cataloguing, and disseminating a body of music that would otherwise be lost forever. And although critics (and some record labels) say that tape trading encourages bootlegging and hurts CD sales, the taper community points to the success of artists like the Dave Matthews Band and Phish, who allow fans to tape their concerts and distribute the recordings, to prove otherwise.

With many more bands following suit, tape trading could become the next Napster — a form of grassroots music distribution paralleling the recording industry, but free of corporate influence and commercial pressure. The growth of the taper community could also signal the expansion of a subversive, relatively new subculture, consisting of thousands of young Americans in search of something more raw and unfiltered than what MTV has to offer — the live concert.

Or it might just be another way to scam free music, dude.

THE HISTORY of concert taping is usually traced to the Grateful Dead’s encouragement of the practice, but it actually goes back much further than that. Though there was no trading network in place until the mid 1970s, music fans were taping live recordings for personal use as early as the 1940s. Dean Benedetti, for example, was a Charlie Parker devotee who in the mid ’40s followed Bird around from club to club, recording his solos (and nothing else) on acetates — homemade 78s. Leon Kagarise, who was recently profiled in the New York Times, recorded hundreds of famous country artists around Washington, DC, and Baltimore during the 1950s and ’60s; several record labels, including the Library of Congress Folklife Center imprint, have expressed interest in issuing his recently publicized collection. Benedetti and Kagarise, however, were extraordinary examples.

It wasn’t until after the appearance of store-bought rock bootlegs in the late 1960s that the noncommercial taping scene began to grow. ÒCommercial bootlegging predates and is a precursor to tape-trading culture,Ó explains Clinton Heylin, a British music writer and author of Bootleg: The Secret History of the Recording Industry (St. Martin’s, 1994). ÒMost of the serious early tape traders began by buying bootlegs and then said, ‘Oh, I can do that.’ The amount of audience tapes that exist from the ’60s — pre-bootleg era — is minuscule on any counted scale. I have never come across anyone who taped in the ’60s who traded with anyone else at the time.Ó

Until the mid 1970s, collecting tradeable tapes, which were recorded illicitly on bulky reel-to-reel recorders, remained a hobby of a well-heeled, well-connected, technically savvy few. But as portable-cassette technology became more sophisticated and affordable, the practice began to mushroom. As Heylin points out, the community of tapers was large enough by the mid ’70s, that every single date of Bob Dylan’s 1974 American tour was recorded from the audience.

Still, this large and growing community remained underground until 1984, when the Grateful Dead began designating taper sections at their shows. Other granola-rock bands followed suit, and groups like Fugazi and Metallica also permitted taping early on. But explosive growth didn’t come to the scene until the mid 1990s. Blame the boom on the usual culprits: digital technology and the Internet. The increasing miniaturization and affordability of digital recording technology made it extremely easy to make crisp, hiss-free recordings on the fly. Though some tapers spend tens of thousands on microphones, preamps, and digital-to-audio converters, it’s possible to buy an entry-level recorder for under $500. Sound degradation, which hampered listening quality in the analog-cassette era, is no longer an issue in this age of minidiscs, recordable CDs, and DAT tapes.

If improved recording technology enhanced the taping community’s technical proficiency, the Internet, as it is wont to do, enhanced the community itself. In the pre-Internet era, tape collectors went to great lengths to acquire new material. Mailing wish lists back and forth, buying classified ads in fanzines, and searching out fellow tapers at concerts were the only means of communication. Now, it’s easy to arrange cross-country trades with a mere e-mail. Type Òtape tradingÓ into a search engine like Google, and literally tens of thousands of hits will come up — either portal sites like Resourcesfortraders.com or personal home pages on which collectors post extensive lists of their holdings. ÒThe Web has facilitated tape trading to the nth degree,Ó says Dean Budnick, the editor of Jambands.com, a online ’zine based in Providence, Rhode Island. ÒA lot of the specialized taping that’s based around specific bands that don’t go on national tours never could’ve happened before the Internet.Ó

NINETY PERCENT of the music I listen to is live, " says taper Rob Shiner. Which means that Shiner pays for only 10 percent of the music he consumes. The rest of his collection is either recorded on his DAT deck, a studio-quality digital recorder, or acquired through trades with fellow tapers. Cash never changes hands; money is useless in the taper community. Tape traders make a very strong distinction between what they do — share recordings freely — and what bootleggers do — sell product. " Bootleg is sort of a taboo word, " explains Shiner. " We never use it. "

Unfortunately for tapers, lawyers see it differently. ÒTape trading and bootlegging are the same thing,Ó says Jay M. Schornstein, a lawyer based in Portland, Oregon, who specializes in entertainment law. ÒI’ll give you a tape, so long as you give me a tape in return. It’s an exchange of value. The law makes no difference between the two.Ó

But even though the recording industry has the law on its side, the continuing miniaturization of digital recording technology makes policing more difficult, and it’s unlikely that the practice will abate. As one record-label executive, speaking anonymously, sighed: ÒIs there anything we can do to stop it? Maybe, but probably not.Ó