Cassettes: Trading master + covers?

8-10 years ago many tape labels were trading master + covers.
Instead of sending the complete tapes in the packages, they sent 1 audio CDr + 5 or 10 covers, and the other labels/ distros would dubb the tapes later… It decreased a lot the postage costs, it was very helpful for small underground labels, it was very frequent in South America for example.

This practice decreased a lot during the last ten years due to the massive arrival of pro tapes. This is good because the quality of tapes increased, both on the sounding and visual levels, it’s globally more professional… But I wonder if totally pro-pressed tapes are always necessary for small obscure releases… (50 copies of a home-made demo etc)

With the new yearly increase of postage costs, it will become a bit harder (again) to send complete tapes in Europe or World…
And I wonder if trading master + covers again wouldn’t be a good idea… Are there still many labels/ bands/ distros operating this way?

If correctly done it could bring quite good results, but it should be done correctly, which wasn’t always the case
(Quality points would be: Dubbing tapes with a good quality tape recorder, checking if the tapes were correctly dubbed… Using mint tapes and not second-hand ones (!)… Using wav files instead of low quality Mp3s to burn the CDr masters, etc)

One of the “negative points” of “master + covers” could be: It can be harder for a distro to take more than 4-5 copies of tape release in 2020… So what would be the point of receiving 10 covers of the same release? But perhaps it works for the labels who have a lot of different releases?

Thoughts, thoughts…

Issue is usually tape lengths... I get masters and don't have tapes that will fit the length or they'd be waaaay too long. I usually only keep 30's 60's and 110's on hand...

Other issue is the tape labels are sometimes sent non-sticker so you have to glue them and if you don't have glue around, it's a pain in the ass and adds to the cost as glues expire and whatnot.

It might be the only way to get decent amounts of items from US to Europe though... shipping one tape costs $15... no one is going to pay that!

Yes I recently got some noise tapes were the length should be around 5-10 minutes or something ahah.
But often a C60 should work.

Ahah, it's true when the stickers aren't adhesive, and just a piece of paper, it can be a bit tricky... But it's rather old releases, I used to see these stuffs more often 10 years ago...
Recently I got a tape with non adhesive stickers, I didn't glue anything since years, it was almost like something new...

Anyway in 2020, 9/10 of the trades are complete tapes.