A great story with a rewarding ending: a music fan from Chicago spent decades recording live concerts on cassette. Now you can listen to them yourself!
Thanks to this interesting article, we were pointed toward an equally fascinating music collection. Here’s the story: starting in the mid-1980s, music enthusiast Adam Jacobs from Chicago made more than 10,000 recordings of live performances. These include major names such as Nirvana, Tracy Chapman, R.E.M. and many more. All recordings were made using a portable cassette recorder and—apparently—often a good-quality microphone. In essence, true bootlegs.
Together, they form a unique snapshot of a musical era. Volunteers have since begun digitizing, mixing and mastering the recordings. The quality of these old cassette tapes, once digitized, turns out to be surprisingly good in most cases.
A nice detail: all of these recordings are now available completely legally online via Internet Archive. Downloads in FLAC format (and others) are possible. The legality is due to the fact that no money is being charged and that virtually no artists have objected. And why would they? The collection offers a unique historical snapshot and an enormous archive of moments from the past—a true piece of music history.