A Fan’s Recordings of Over 10K Concerts Are Now Online

Photo Credit: Aadam Jacobs Collection (Internet Archive)

A fan’s recordings of over 10,000 concerts across four decades are now becoming a curated online archive, thanks to a group of volunteers.

Since 1984, a music fan named Aadam Jacobs has been recording audio of sets from up-and-coming bands, predominantly in Chicago. Now, thanks to a group of volunteers across the United States and Europe, these recordings are being methodically catalogued, digitized, and uploaded to the Internet Archive.

Jacobs’ work has led to thousands of recordings of sets that otherwise had not seen the light of day. These include early career performances from Nirvana, The Cure, The Pixies, The Replacements, Depeche Mode, Sonic Youth, and many more.

While it’s mostly sets from indie and punk bands from the 1980s through the early 2000s, there’s also “a smattering of hip-hop,” including a 1988 performance by Boogie Down Productions. Phish fans were delighted to discover a previously uncirculated 1990 show among the recordings. There’s also hundreds of sets from smaller artists, many of whom are decidedly obscure.

All of this and more is gradually becoming available for streaming and free download on the nonprofit online repository, the Internet Archive.

Jacobs says he doesn’t consider himself an “archivist.” He’s simply a music fan who figured that as long as he was going to attend a few concerts a week, he might as well document them. Gradually, club owners who initially tried to prevent him from taping even started letting him in for free.

When a local filmmaker made a documentary about Jacobs in 2023, a volunteer at the Internet Archive reached out to him to suggest preserving his collections.

“Before all the tapes started not working because of time, just disintegrating, I finally said yes,” Jacobs said.

Now, archivist Brian Emerick makes a trip to Jacobs’ house in Chicago once a month to pick up “10 or 20 boxes, each stuffed with 50 or 100 tapes.” Emerick transfers the analog recordings to digital files that can be sent to other volunteers for mixing and mastering for eventual upload to the archive. Emerick says he’s digitized approximately 5,500 shows since late 2024, and it will take another few years to complete the project.

It’s an impressive undertaking, to be sure. But what about the rightsholders? According to Jacobs, the majority of artists he’s recorded are pleased to have their work preserved, but he’s happy to remove recordings if requested. So far, only one or two musicians have asked that their material be taken down.

David Nimmer, a copyright attorney who also teaches at UCLA, said that under anti-bootlegging laws, the artists still technically own the original compositions and live recordings. But since Jacobs and the Internet Archive neither one are profiting from the project, Nimmer posited that lawsuits seem unlikely.