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Live music fans, Christmas has come early thanks to the Aadam Jacobs Collection.
Online as of November 30th, 2025, the massive recording archive is the painstaking work of the namesake Chicago music devotee. Since the early ’80s, Jacobs has recorded and collected some 10,000 local shows performed by acts like Nirvana, R.E.M., The Cure, Pavement, Pixies, Sonic Youth, Phish, Depeche Mode, Stereolab, Björk, Uncle Tupelo, Hüsker Dü, Liz Phair, and many, many more. The collection (housed via the Internet Archive) now spans over 2,000 digitized recordings and represents a couple decades of live music.
“I don’t have enough life left in me to digitize everything I have,” Jacobs told the Chicago Reader back in January. “And it’s just decaying. So before everything falls apart, it needs to be digitized. There’s no sense in me holding onto the vast majority of what I have for potential release someday. So it’s best if it gets out of my hands, so that it can live on beyond me.”
Given the insane scope of the project, a group of volunteers help Jacobs digitize, restore, catalog, and upload his collection. With individuals based in both the United States and Europe pitching in, Jacobs and the crew spend time cleaning up the audio, marking set lists and song titles, and getting everything on the web. One member of the operation, Brian Emerick, even makes his way to Jacobs’ house on a monthly basis to pick up the next set of boxes of tapes, as reported by Book Club Chicago. Emerick estimates it will take another few years to get through all of the remaining tapes.
While Jacobs has never once tried to monetize his massive collection, he has given away countless CD-R copies to artists for their own use. For instance, The Replacements added Jacobs’ own recordings to flesh out their live album Not Ready for Prime Time: Live at the Cabaret Metro (which was recorded in 1986 and released for RSD 2024). Jacobs also routinely helps out with the Internet Archive’s Live Music Archive, providing metadata for the various releases.
Enjoy the endless bounty of the Aadam Jacobs Collection right via Internet Archive. You can also check out a documentary on “the Chicago tape guy,” made by filmmaker Katlin Schneider, below. And, please, be sure to send your “Sonic Santa” some very good vibes.
English (US) · 