Lending music to friends

In the days before I could just plug the iPhone into the car audio system, I never used to play original CDs in the car.  Always used CD-Rs.

I am asked to loan this or that to friends, and refuse!

I make them a gift if the recording is still available, and buy a new copy.

I have converted many to the delights of classical music with judicious gifts and am glad about it.

ATB from George

PS: I'd prefer to give a recording I no longer listen to, to a friend than donate it to Oxfam, and will play it through to see if it delights. If not it still goes to Oxfam. Thee recording I part with are always deleted from iTunes ...

Quite right George. Remember 'Home taping is killing music'?

All this 'Can I borrow it and rip it?'  malarkey will surely cause the music industry to shoot themselves in the foot.

Some people have lost sight of the fact that commercially recorded music is damn cheap, compared to what it used to cost in my youth. If I like something, I buy it.

John.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be. I had too many LPs returned with beer glass rings or just generally unplayable to ever consider doing it again. I've copied many cds for friends to listen to but never hand out the originals.

I regularly share CDs with a couple of close and trusted friends - it is a good way to hear new music.

+1

My experience mirrors much of what was said above.  In the days of my vinyl collection, the damage to the record was the problem - to the point where I made it a policy to simply not lend vinyl.  Books just never seemed to make it back.   Ever. 

I loaned a movie DVD to a coworker about 8 years ago, and when I finally got it back (after repeated requests that it be returned) it has some kind of sticky substance on the surface almost like a syrup of some sort) that would not come off and I just gave up and threw it away, as it was unplayable. (grrr...)

I find it almost amazing (albeit not really) that people can be so disrespectful of others' property...I know I was raised very differently than that, and when someone loans me anything I am almost anal about the care of that item and the prompt return of same.

In that respect what goes around definitely doesn't come around.

I remember a whole bunch of cassettes went walkies while I was at University.  Nobody owned up to having borrowed them.  A couple in particular were impossible to get in the UK.  Then one day my room-mate got back in the wee hours looking a bit bedraggled and explained that he'd had a "bit of an accident" on the way back from Crail and would I drive him back to the scene and help him clear up a bit. 

When we got there the car wasn't to be seen although there were the signs of something large having gone through the hedge.  The car itself was a total wreck and had obviously rolled it's way down the road and into one of the fields at Cambo.  There was still a fair bit of detritus littering the road - he'd had the windows open.  And then I came across something familiar  - a torn section of inlay from George Clinton's Should 'nt nuff Bit Fish.  Hmmm...  and then more familiar looking cassettes, fragments of a treasured compilation for an ex, another fragment of a bootleg I'd recorded myself, shells in pieces and tape strewn for yards. Nothing had survived intact.  My poor cassettes!

B*gger.

The culture of the friends I grew up with was very much that of loaning LPs to all and sundry. I can't recall any I've inadvertently acquired but there's a lot I've lost to heaven-knows-who (although I still think my cousin snaffled my first two Rolling Stones' albums)

When I started work in the mid-sixties we used to have a record club whereby we all paid in & every month one of us went out & bought an LP which we then proceeded to pass round the members until it arrived back at the original purchaser. I've quite a few albums from this time and, remarkably, the majority of them are in surprisingly good nick. I've seen some them strewn around, coverless, on the floor after a party after every Tom, Dick & Harry's been plonking them on the turntable & dropping the stylus onto the playing surface.