A Unique Musical Legacy
In the summer of 1989, in Chicago, a music enthusiast named Aadam Jacobs began recording a live concert using a small Sony cassette recorder. This was the debut performance of a fledgling rock band at a small club called Dreamerz. Before they started playing, the band’s lead singer introduced themselves to the crowd: “Hello, we’re Nirvana. We’re from Seattle.” This early tape, recorded over two years before the release of their iconic album Nevermind, is one of more than 10,000 concerts that Jacobs has recorded over the years.
Now, volunteers in the US and across Europe are working together to digitise and upload these tapes onto the Aadam Jacobs Collection, hosted on the non-profit online repository Internet Archive. The collection spans four decades and documents musical acts from the 1980s through to the early 2000s. From R.E.M. and The Cure to Tracy Chapman, Jacobs’ collection offers a rare glimpse into the early careers of celebrated artists as well as performances by lesser-known musicians.
After a 2023 documentary titled Melomaniac (a term for someone with an intense love for music), a volunteer from the Internet Archive reached out to Jacobs, asking if he would like to preserve his collection. “Before all the tapes started not working because of time, just disintegrating, I finally said yes,” Jacobs said.
The Beginnings of a Passion
Jacobs started this labour-of-love in 1984, recording a concert on a Dictaphone-type device borrowed from his grandmother. As a teenager who used to tape songs off the radio, he recalls how someone suggested an alternative: “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 purchased 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. Over time, Jacobs moved onto digital audio tape and solid-state digital recorders.
The Digitisation Process
Today, digitising and archiving the numerous boxes of Jacobs’ tapes is an ongoing process. Once a month, Brian Emerick — tasked with transferring the analog recordings to digital files — travels to Jacobs’ house and picks up 10 to 20 boxes, each containing between 50 to 100 tapes.
The digital files Emerick produces are then sent to volunteers who mix and master the recordings before they are uploaded to the online collection. Since late 2024, Emerick has digitised at least 5,500 tapes.
Copyright and Preservation
As for copyright concerns, Jacobs said that most artists are glad to have their work preserved but he is willing to remove recordings if requested — though only one or two musicians have asked for that so far.
David Nimmer, a copyright attorney who also teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles, explained that artists own their live recordings and original compositions under anti-bootlegging laws, but lawsuits seem unlikely as neither Jacobs nor the archive is profiting from them.
Surprising Quality of Recordings
Many of Jacobs’ recordings are of impressive quality, which came as a happy surprise to volunteer engineers like Neil deMause, considering Jacobs was not using top-of-the-line recording equipment.
“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.
A Growing Collection
As the Aadam Jacobs Collection is slowly and painstakingly being pieced together, melomaniacs around the world can indulge in these time capsules, spanning four decades of musical experimentation and refinement.
