The music collection of a 59-year-old Chicago man who attended more than 10,000 concerts and recorded them on cassette tapes is slowly being digitized and released online for free.
Like many GenX kids, Aadam Jacobs used cassette tapes to record music off the radio, but it wasn’t until 1984 that he met someone who suggested sneaking a tape recorder into a music venue to record concerts.
By 1989, Jacobs, who only considers himself a fan of music and not an archivist, had his system of recording concerts dialed in.
In one recording, a blast of guitar feedback can be heard before a 22-year-old Kurt Cobain addresses a small club called Dreamerz, saying, “Hello, we’re Nirvana. We’re from Seattle,” before launching into the song “School,” more than two years before the band broke through with the album Nevermind.
The decades-deep collection spans the 1980s through the early 2000s and features indie and punk rock performances from bands like The Replacements, The Pixies, Depeche Mode, Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Björk and Stereolab, long before many became mainstream.
There’s also a smattering of hip-hop, including a 1988 concert by rap pioneers Boogie Down Productions. Devotees of Phish were thrilled to discover that a previously uncirculated 1990 show by the jam band is included. And there are hundreds of sets by smaller artists who are unlikely to be known to even fans with the most obscure tastes.
In the early days of surreptitiously recording shows, Jacobs was forced to sneak around club owners who didn’t want him taping gigs.
As the years passed and his notoriety on the Chicago music scene blossomed, however, he was often called the “taper guy” and sometimes let into shows for free.
After a 2004 profile in the Chicago Reader which led to a 2023 documentary about Jacobs, the Internet Archive reached out to suggest digitizing his collection so it could be preserved before the cassette tapes disintegrated with time.
Now, volunteers travel to Jacobs’ home in the Chicago suburbs once a month to pick up 10 or 20 boxes containing anywhere from 50 to 100 cassettes.
With tapes in hand, volunteer Brian Emerick transfers the analog recordings into digital files.
“Currently, I have 10 working cassette decks, and I run those all simultaneously,” Emerick explained.
He estimates he has digitized about 5,000 tapes since late 2024 and expects the project to take several more years.
The digital files are then sent to other volunteers, some in the U.S. and others in Europe, who work to clean up the audio and catalog the individual concerts.
Once complete, the recordings are uploaded to the Internet Archive, where they are listed as the Aadam Jacobs Collection within the Live Music Archive and can be accessed for free.
When it comes to copyright, Jacobs said most artists he recorded are pleased to have their work preserved in such an unusual way. In the one or two cases where musicians did not want their recordings included, he said he is happy to remove them.
“I think the general consensus is, it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission,” Jacobs said.
One longtime copyright attorney and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles noted that artists technically own the rights to their original compositions and live recordings, but lawsuits are unlikely because neither Jacobs nor the Internet Archive are profiting from the project.
Jacobs stopped going to concerts a few years ago, but he said he still enjoys experiencing live music online, much of it now recorded by a new generation of fans using their cellphones.
