How far would you go to listen to and share music? In post-WWII Russia, music appreciators would go quite far, so far that they created what is now refererred to as "bone music"—thin, makeshift bootleg "albums" etched onto used x-rays, played at 78 RPM. It was way music lovers could bypass state censorship. NPR did a focus piece on "bone music" featuring a conversation with Stephen Coates, from the band The Real Tuesday Weld, who has uncovered a lot of the unknow mysteries about this period in Russia's music past. As Coates explains:
What happened was, it's 1946 or so. The Second World War is over but a much colder war has begun, and in the Soviet Union a lot of culture was subject to a censor, whether it be art, paintings, architecture, film. In St. Petersburg — Leningrad, as it was then — a guy turned up, and he had a war trophy with him. That war trophy was what's called a recording lathe: It's like a gramophone in reverse, a device which you can use to write the grooves of music onto plastic. People who came into his shop observed what he was doing, and, as is the Russian way, they "bootlegged" his machine and made their own machines.
It was a bit like dealing or buying drugs, actually. These records were bought and sold on street corners, in dark alleyways, in the park. We did hear a funny thing, which was that if you asked for a particular song — say, "Rock Around the Clock" — and the dealer didn't have it, quite often they would say, "Yeah, I've got that," and they would go in the corner and write "Rock Around the Clock" on one of their other records and give it to you. So there's lots of stories about people buying these records, and they may not have even known what "Rock Around the Clock" sounded like. They'd go home and put it on and it could have been anything, and they were like, "Yeah, that's Bill Haley. He's great!"
You can learn more about this bit of music history, albeit kind of creepy music history, on the site devoted to this project: X-Ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone.
Puts into perspective how easy it is to share music today.
X-ray audio from Michal Dzierza on Vimeo.