A Chicago music fan who taped more than 10,000 concerts over four decades is now having those recordings digitised and uploaded for free to the Internet Archive.
The collection includes an early 1989 recording of Nirvana’s debut show at the small Chicago club Dreamerz. Before the band started playing, the lead singer told the crowd: “Hello, we’re Nirvana. We’re from Seattle.”
Jacobs recorded that show more than two years before the release of Nirvana’s second album, Nevermind.
His tapes, recorded from the 1980s through to the early 2000s, include artists such as R.E.M., The Cure and Tracy Chapman, along with performances by smaller acts.
The recordings are being organised, digitised and uploaded by volunteers in the US and across Europe to the Aadam Jacobs Collection, hosted by the non-profit online repository Internet Archive.
Jacobs started recording concerts in 1984 using a Dictaphone-type device he borrowed from his grandmother. As a teenager who used to tape songs off the radio, he said someone gave him another idea.
“I eventually met a fellow who said, ‘You can just take a tape recorder into a show with you, just sneak it in, record the show.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s cool.’ So I got started.”
He soon bought a Sony Walkman-style recorder.
“I was using, at times, pretty lackluster equipment, simply because I had no money to buy anything better,” he said.
He later switched to digital audio tape and solid-state digital recorders.
The archiving effort began after filmmaker Katlin Schneider’s 2023 documentary about Jacobs, Melomaniac. Jacobs said a volunteer from Internet Archive contacted him and asked if he wanted to preserve the collection.
“Before all the tapes started not working because of time, just disintegrating, I finally said yes,” Jacobs said.
The work is still underway. Brian Emerick, who transfers the analog recordings to digital files, travels to Jacobs’ home once a month and picks up 10 to 20 boxes, with each box holding between 50 and 100 tapes.
The digital files are then sent to volunteers who mix and master the recordings before upload.
Emerick has digitised at least 5,500 tapes since late 2024.
Jacobs said most artists are happy to have the recordings preserved, and he is willing to remove any if asked. He said only one or two musicians have requested that so far.
David Nimmer, a copyright attorney who teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles, said artists own their live recordings and original compositions under anti-bootlegging laws, but lawsuits appear unlikely because neither Jacobs nor the archive is making money from them.
Volunteer engineer Neil deMause said many of the tapes sound surprisingly strong despite the basic equipment Jacobs used.
“Especially after the first couple years, he’s got it so dialed in that some of these recordings, on, like, crappy little cassette tapes from the early 90s, sound incredible,” deMause said.
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