Aadam Jacobs - 10,000 gigs, all on tape — now online

This is a proper one.

A Chicago music fan, Aadam Jacobs, spent years going to shows and recording them on cassette.

No big plan behind it — just turning up, pressing record, and keeping it.

Over time that turned into a huge archive. Over 10,000 gigs, mostly from the mid-80s through to the early 2000s.

Some of it captures artists right before they broke. There’s early Nirvana in small rooms, plus recordings of ACR, Björk, Depeche Mode, and plenty more. But just as important are the lesser-known names — the ones that never made it out of those rooms.

That’s what makes this interesting. It’s not curated or polished. It’s just what happened.

Back in the day, he had to sneak recorders into venues. Later on, he became known locally as “the taper guy” and sometimes got let in. No money in it, no agenda — just documenting what was in front of him.

Now the whole collection is being digitised.

Volunteers are transferring thousands of tapes, cleaning them up and cataloguing them. Around 5,000 have already been done, with plenty more still to go. Everything is being uploaded to the Internet Archive, free to access.

There’s no paywall, no commercial angle. Just a solid piece of music culture being preserved properly.

Worth digging through — you can stream or download here: https://archive.org/details/aadamjacobs

Loads in there.