Discussion
GaryBluto: Good, but I doubt they'll last long on there before a DMCA takedown or lawsuit.
monooso: A discussion from six days ago (same story, different source):https://apnews.com/article/aadam-jacobs-collection-concerts-...
HelloUsername: Previous discussion: "Volunteers turn a fan's recordings of 10K concerts into an online treasure trove" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47687443 8-apr-2026 76 comments
EvanAnderson: Here's the discussion from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47687443I was pleased to find some "They Might Be Giants" in the archive.
joecool1029: They covered it in the apnews source. Takedowns are available but only a few bands requested it, most were supportive of the archive.
zoobab: Mirror the archive before it get taken down.
cyanbane: Some stuff I snagged the other day when it was posted:Elf Power Live at Lounge Ax 1998-04-25 https://archive.org/details/ajc01382_elf-power-1998-04-25Fountains Of Wayne Live at The Vic Theatre 2003-11-19 https://archive.org/details/ajc00691_fountains-of-wayne-2003...Fugazi Live at State Theatre on 1991-08-06 https://archive.org/details/ajc02237_fugazi1991-08-06.ajcpro...Godspeed You! Black Emperor Live at Lounge Ax on 1999-09-16 https://archive.org/details/ajc02676_gybe1999-09-16.ajcproje...Iron & Wine Live at Abbey Pub 2004-07-02 (Late show) https://archive.org/details/ajc01329_iron-wine-2004-07-02.la...Josh Rouse Live at Schubas Tavern 2004-04-26 https://archive.org/details/ajc01208_josh-rouse-2004-04-26Midnight Oil Live at Cabaret Metro 1988-04-30 https://archive.org/details/ajc02792_midnightoil1988-04-30Neutral Milk Hotel Live at Lounge Ax 1997-05-01 https://archive.org/details/ajc00789_neutralmilkhotel1997-05...OK Go Live at Belmont-Sheffield Music Festival 2003-05-31 https://archive.org/details/ajc01120_ok-go-2003-05-31Pavement Live at Lounge Ax 1992-06-12 https://archive.org/details/ajc00811_pavement1992-06-12Polyphonic Spree Live at Metro on 2003-10-07 https://archive.org/details/ajc01050-PolyphonicSpree2003-10-...Ratatat Live at Abbey Pub 2004-05-14 https://archive.org/details/ajc01220_ratatat-2004-05-14Rogue Wave Live at Schubas Tavern on 2005-01-30 https://archive.org/details/ajc01227_roguewave2005-01-30.ajc...Super Furry Animals Live at Abbey Pub 2002-04-19 https://archive.org/details/ajc01144_super-furry-animals-200...The Decemberists Live at Intonation Fest on 2005-07-17 https://archive.org/details/ajc00642_decemberists2005-07-17....The Folk Implosion Live at Schubas Tavern 2000-02-29 (Late show) https://archive.org/details/ajc00963_folk_implosion_2000-02-...The Shins Live at Schubas Tavern 2001-08-24 https://archive.org/details/ajc01131_the_shins_2001-08-24
vaylian: To quote:> Jacobs said the majority of the artists he recorded are pleased to have their work preserved. As for copyright concerns, he’s happy to remove recordings if requested, but added that only one or two musicians so far have asked that their material be taken down.I think the keyword here is "preserved". These are old recordings that cannot realistically be recreated by any other method. AI may reconstruct some parts, but it's still not the real thing. These recordings are time capsules.
Scoundreller: > Takedowns are available but only a few bands requested it101% chance Metallica did this
Ylpertnodi: 101% kiss
lokar: Tangent idea: musicians should record every live show, and then put it on a streaming service, only for people who bought tickets to the show (possibly for an extra small fee on the ticket). Extra revenue for the artist, and a cool benefit for the fan (the liver performance you attended).
RajT88: There's a niche market for this. Whoever builds it will make a good living, I feel.
nour833: Yeah but you know DMCA may intervene to delete it if they are copyrighted (as it happened with many media content before)
LargeWu: For those interested, Relisten is another repository of live concert recordings. It skews heavily towards improvisational music, ie jambands, but there's some indie rock on there as well.https://relisten.net/
bigfishrunning: Cool site, thanks! it seems to also be backed by archive.org, i wonder if there's a way to move more stuff into that interface. the nirvana performance in the article isn't there for instance.
ClifReeder: This is very much a among jam bands - see https://www.nugs.net/
tiahura: There are so many concert recordings of awesome performances that sound like crap because they are audience tapes.Often before a performance recorded music is played and captured in the audience recordings.Would it be possible to train a model on an archive of these concert audience recordings of studio recordings paired with the original studio recordings to develop a system to “clean up” audience recordings?
alsetmusic: This is one of the best things I've read about in a bit. It wasn't uncommon to buy marked-up (overpriced) bootlegs of live performances on CDs in the 90s. You never knew in advance if it'd be a quality recording or total garbage. We've lost that.I still love when one of my live bootlegs of Faith No More comes on with them doing (sometimes mocking) parodies of popular music (their rendition of Nothing Compares to You by Sinead OConnor has been in my head as I type this). When I got to see them in 2010 (I think) they were true to form and played a bunch of short (reinterpretations) covers and it was one of the best aspects of the show. And I still have a Mr Bungle bootleg with them covering Existential Blues by Tom "T-Bone" Stankus (I always thought it was Doctor Demento's Wizard of Oz until just now when I looked it up).How would you even know about these awesome gems without bootlegs or access to see all their live shows? YouTube is less likely to capture an entire show than a clip, whereas the bootlegs were typically the full show. There are probably areas of the internet where this stuff gets shared and traded, but having it in my local music shop meant everyone had access without requiring special knowledge.I just did two searches, one Google and one Kagi, and neither turned up the FNM Nothing Compares to You. Who knows how many copies of it exist in the world. If my music library gets nuked, who will even know about it? I think I'm gonna start uploading my bootleg recordings of live shows to IA.
tuumi: I remember this too. Those bootlegs were $30 each and my friend group was really into Pearl Jam. If I remember correctly a lot of these were made out of Italy. In college (maybe late 90s) I somehow managed to come up with $500 to buy a CD burner. I would make copies of these bootlegs and sell to friends for $10. I couldn't keep up and made my money back to pay for the burner relatively quickly. I think I was even able to find some to download then burning saving me the $30 at the record store. I made my own funny CD covers. Once I got my money back for the CD burner I just asked for the cost of the Cds. Great trip down memory lane.
criddell: > he has to use anachronistic cassette decks to play the tapes, which get converted into digital filesAnachronistic?It seems like a complicated way of saying "the tapes were digitized".
natios: why not have it accessible to everyone so collectors can have a field day with it!
dewey: Are you working for free too?
xd1936: Available for everyone to purchase*, not just the local venue ticket holders.
reenorap: I remember back in the early 90s I think on the internet when it was only accessible via my university, reading on a newsgroup about how people traded bootlegs from various concerts. People would mail cassette tapes around the country and would use double cassette recorders to make a copy of their bootleg and mail it back to people. It was definitely a different time
ClifReeder: One of the authors/maintainers of Relisten posted that they are working on adding the Aadam Jacbos collection - https://bsky.app/profile/saewitz.com/post/3mjawvvklls2v
mesofile: Fugazi enjoyers should also know about their own very extensive archive of live showshttps://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series
tclancy: Source article is more enjoyable http://blockclubchicago.org/2026/04/10/from-early-nirvana-to...
bahmboo: This should be the link. Thanks
tracker1: Maybe... however, most bands tend to drift a LOT from the studio versions of songs while touring.
tracker1: At the last "That Damn Show" in Phoenix (2001 iirc), a couple of the bands were burning and selling CDs from that show. Was kind of nice/wild to see.
bilekas: I have my worries about Internet Archive more and more recently.I'm wondering though is there any decentralized IPFS or P2P Archive of the entire archive that can be helped with for preservation ?https://www.wired.com/story/the-internets-most-powerful-arch...
kkkqkqkqkqlqlql: If you really want to share it, how about torrenting it?
CoffeeOnWrite: IA makes the most sense in the spirit of preservation.Etree (https://www.etree.org/ ) is the longest running torrent site for tapes. It looks like only about 5% of the hundred thousand torrents have any seeders at all. Not sure how reliable requesting a seed is. I’d expect long tail stuff to get “effectively lost”. Versus IA whose purpose and funding is preservation, in addition to sharing.
HappMacDonald: Etree is missing self-seed then. What if IA hosted torrents like Etree does but also self-seeded the content?Thus they are encouraging amateur third parties to pick up some of the archival slack, that style of torrent could outlive IA in case anything happened to them, and it reduces some of their bandwidth costs
sdellis: According to the Wikipedia page, it seems that copies of the archive are stored around the world.LOCKSS is a decentralized strategy for preservation which includes archival copies at remote sites. It has been in use for a very long time. I feel like preservation via IPFS would introduce quite a bit of risk to the goal.
schwartzworld: It's funny to think how much effort was put into preventing bootlegging, when now everything is being recorded all the time.The few bands that didn't care or even encouraged it reaped the benefits. I was a huge Ween fan in the 90s and bootlegged a show of theirs myself. Camera and recording devices were allowed and the result was a tremendous amount of live content available online. For some bands this might not matter, but they rarely played the same set list twice and often played songs differently from show to show. In the early internet days, there was more ween content online than you could ever hope to listen to.
internet101010: Effort is still being put into it. Just this weekend YouTube put the 4K Coachella streams behind SABR. I could still get 1080p easily but 4K required some fanangling.
xnx: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47717957
darkstarsys: But what about copyright? Asking for a friend.
dhosek: Nihil sub sola novum est.This has been done. Peter Gabriel, for example, did this on one of his tours (I think Back to Front, but I’m too lazy to dig it up). The California Guitar Trio also experimented with it.I’m guessing the fact that it’s not a widespread practice is that the return on investment (and we’re talking strictly the additional costs beyond simply recording the show) didn’t justify the effort.
sph: My friend Sam Altman said not to worry.
Projectiboga: This is a fun area, as the DMCA, for its flaws included a loophole for non-commercial distribution of live concert recordings. The only requirement is that it isn't an exact copy of a commercial release. I am not sure about the exact standards, as live albums often aren't the entire concert. Here are some other sites where people share these tapes.http://www.thetradersden.org/https://sugarmegs.org/http://www.dimeadozen.org/
zimpenfish: > This has been done.Yeah, I've been to low double-figure gigs[0] where they were selling soundboard CDs shortly after the gig. If I'm not mistaken, a bunch of them were being done by the same company (but an internet search is unproductive.)[0] In London, I want to say late 2000s, early 2010s?
strickinato: I can't more highly recommend this book for getting into the headspace of the era a lot of these recordings.11 chapters about DIY / Punk / Hardcore bands of the 1980s underground scene.(The audiobook in particular is fun as it's read by musicians influenced by the artists in their respective chapters)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Band_Could_Be_Your_Life
pjmorris: Seconded. This was a great read, and led me to a lot of great listening. And some wondering about how far Minutemen would've went if D. Boon hadn't passed so early.I also think there's a lot to learn from the book about DIY for any startup or community organizer.Lastly, if you read and you want to learn more about 'The Replacements', 'Trouble Boys', Bob Mehr, is a terrific read.
mmmlinux: So how long till your just greeted with a page telling you the archive has it, but you can't download it because of DMCA.
