Thousands of rare concert recordings have made their way to the Internet Archive – listen now

Chicago-based music fan Adam Jacobs has been recording the concerts he’s been to since the 1980s and amassing an archive of… More than 10,000 tapes. Now 59, Jacobs knew those tapes would deteriorate over time, so he agreed to let volunteers from the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, Digitizing tapes.

To date, about 2,500 of these tapes have been published on the Internet Archive, including some rare gems like Nirvana performance from 1989. (The group was unable to reach mainstream audiences until it released the single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991.) Within the collection, you can also find previously unknown recordings by influential artists such as Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Phish, Liz Phair, Pavement, Neutral Milk Hotel, and a whole host of other punk groups.

For many of these recordings, Jacobs was using very modest equipment, but volunteer audio engineers working with the Internet Archive made these tapes sound amazing.

One of the volunteers, Brian Emerick, He drives to Jacobs’ house Once a month to pick up more boxes of tapes – he has to use outdated cassette decks to play the tapes, which are converted to digital files. From there, other volunteers clean, organize and label the recordings, and even track down the names of songs from forgotten punk bands.

Sometimes, the Internet is good. And so it is This is a Tracy Chapman recording From 1988.