Thousands of rare music cassettes are now available on the Internet Archive — listen now

Chicago music enthusiast Adam Jacobs has been recording concerts he attends since the 1980s, keeping records of over 10,000 tapes. Now 59, Jacobs knows the tapes will deteriorate over time, so he agreed to have volunteers from the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, digitize the tapes.

Currently, about 2,500 of these tapes have been posted on the Internet Archive, including gems like Nirvana’s career since 1989. (The band wouldn’t break through to a mainstream audience until they released the single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991.) Within the collection, you’ll also find previously unknown recordings from popular artists such as Sonic Youth, REM, Phish, Liz Phair, Pavement, Neutral Milk Hotel, and a whole host of other punk bands.

For most of the recordings, Jacobs was using audio equipment, but volunteer engineers working with the Internet Archive have made the tapes sound better.

One volunteer, Brian Emerick, went to Jacobs’ house once a month to get many boxes of tapes – they have to use anachronistic cassettes to play the tapes, which are converted to digital files. From there, other volunteers clean, organize, and write notes, even researching song names from forgotten punk bands.

Sometimes, the internet is good. And so it is this Tracy Chapman drawing since 1988.