Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive

Really interesting to see how far this story has spread, I saw it in my Chicago groups first and now it’s popped up in outlets all over the world. I guess it shows how nostalgic we are for an earlier time, both in music and internet culture.

HelloUsername• 3 months ago

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

alsetmusic6• 3 months ago

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.

kkkqkqkqkqlqlql• 3 months ago

If you really want to share it, how about torrenting it?

CoffeeOnWrite• 3 months ago

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.

thinkingtoilet• 3 months ago

Mike Patton loves pop music. Those covers were most likely not mocking anything. I love me some Faith No More but haven't heard them cover Nothing Compares 2 U (which is actually a Prince tune). I'll have to check it out.

EDIT: You weren't kidding. I can't find a cover of it. Please! Share it!

alsetmusic6• 3 months ago

See sibling comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47768467

acomjean2• 3 months ago

FNM’s cover of the Commodore’s Easy is both ridiculous and sublime. Man they can play.

There was a good bbc show of theirs floating around on YouTube. The music is so intense that I feel these quieter pieces give one a chance to catch one’s breath.

tuumi• 3 months ago

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.

alsetmusic6• 3 months ago

$30 each

Same in my town. For a 14 yo kid, that was a lot.

frereubu• 3 months ago

You never knew in advance if it'd be a quality recording or total garbage.

I once bought a VHS recording of a Lemonheads gig after seeing them at the Glastonbury festival, guess it must have been around 1993, and in visual terms it was absolutely unwatchable - the camera wasn't still for a second - but probably pretty representative of what it was like to be there.

roskelld2• 3 months ago

Are you certain Faith No More did the cover? There's certainly a Mr. Bungle version [0] from a San Francisco gig in 1990. I remember grabbing this from the Bungle Fever FTP site back in around '99. I'd often download the bootlegs, burn them to audio CD and print out a cover of the gig poster if one was available.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTfSrUThyDk

alsetmusic6• 3 months ago

That's exactly the one I have! No surprise that it was mislabeled. Same vocalist, so that tended to happen before broadband was widely available. I even downloaded a song (Nebula) from Incubus's SCIENCE that was misattributed to Mr Bungle. To be fair, the singer plausibly could have been said to be doing a Mike Patton imitation.

Now that I think more about it, I must have got the track from a P2P service / network. But I had a bajillion Nirvana bootlegs when I was an adolescent. Thinking of the misnaming phenomenon, the hidden track (from Nevermind) was alternately named either "I Hate Myself and I Want to Die" or "I Love Myself and I Want to Live" on those live performances (after Cobain's suicide). 1990s and no or limited internet, so it was whatever someone decided.

Thanks for surfacing the track so readers can hear it! It's one of my favorites.

cyanbane• 3 months ago

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-1998-04-25

Fountains 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-2004-04-26

Midnight Oil Live at Cabaret Metro 1988-04-30 https://archive.org/details/ajc02792_midnightoil1988-04-30

Neutral 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-2003-05-31

Pavement Live at Lounge Ax 1992-06-12 https://archive.org/details/ajc00811_pavement1992-06-12

Polyphonic 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-2004-05-14

Rogue 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

mesofile• 3 months ago

Fugazi enjoyers should also know about their own very extensive archive of live shows

https://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series

LargeWu• 3 months ago

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• 3 months ago

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.

ClifReeder2• 3 months ago

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

nour833• 3 months ago

Yeah but you know DMCA may intervene to delete it if they are copyrighted (as it happened with many media content before)

lokar3• 3 months ago

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• 3 months ago

There's a niche market for this. Whoever builds it will make a good living, I feel.

natios• 3 months ago

why not have it accessible to everyone so collectors can have a field day with it!

dewey• 3 months ago

Are you working for free too?

ClifReeder2• 3 months ago

This is very much a among jam bands - see https://www.nugs.net/

lokar3• 3 months ago

That looks like just a subscription thing, right?

I saw David Byrne last week, during checkout for the ticket I would probably have paid an extra $10 to get access to the recording of that show.

petetnt• 3 months ago

Fugazi released almost 900 shows on CD in the early 2000’s, costing 5 bucks a piece. Some of them are available on their Bandcamp page these days too https://fugazi.bandcamp.com/.

ilamont4• 3 months ago

Not only that, you can listen to many of them for free from the Fugazi online concert archive: https://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series

(See my comment upthread about Fugazi and the unexpected encounter with Ian MacKaye after I stumbled upon an obscure YouTube recording)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47769059

tracker13• 3 months ago

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.

dfxm124• 3 months ago

Why restrict it to ticket holders? I'm sure bands don't want to leave money on the table either. Metallica surely doesn't: https://www.metallica.com/store/live-metallica-cds/

101008• 3 months ago

I love going to concerts and I tried pitching this to producers, bands, etc. They just don't care unfortunately.

My mindset was: They already did most of the work, just exporting the audio (that already exists!) would give them extra income. Could be a subscription service, or pay per album, or even for free (it's a marketing channel).

Some bands don't want their live recording out there (multiple reasons: from errors during the live show, or to keep the experience exclusive, or they think some people won't want to go to see them live if they already can listen to it). There is also the aspect of "If we release it for free or in the platform, we can't never make an actual live recording album", which could make some sense.

For years I dreamt about this "Netflix for unreleased live concerts" platform but I couldn't reach anything. Maybe I am really bad seller, and I just needed help from someone with more experience with the industry.

I ended up doing this unofficially for my faovurite artist, with the help of friends and collectors, uploading bootlegs (sometimes amateur recordings, sometimes board sound recording), and catalogued so you can search for all the plays of a particular song, or an album, how many times this song was played, if there was a guest, filter by country, city, year, etc, etc.

pimlottc4• 3 months ago

There is also the legitimate view that a concert is a physical, ephemeral experience shared by the people in the room on the night. That is it fleeting is part of its beauty, in the same manner as live theater.

Which is not to say no concert should ever be recorded, but I could understand why it wouldn’t be a priority for some artists.

adamsilkey• 3 months ago

I think it's a little more nuanced than "bands/producers don't care" and a bit more complex than "exporting the audio (that already exists!)".

Directly exporting the audio straight from the mixer would not necessarily produce quality recordings because the audio there is tuned for the purposes of sound reinforcement. To properly record a live concert requires an entirely separate setup with their own microphones and then some direct output from the mixer on a per channel basis to allow for post-production editing.

And a lot of people don't care about that! Lots of people are happy with the quality you'd get straight from a cell phone microphone.

But the people on stage and the people in the industry ... they're the ones actually involved in producing the sound, and many care very deeply about the quality that gets recorded and then shared. That's not to say that all musicians are like that, but many are!

dhosek2• 3 months ago

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.

zimpenfish• 3 months ago

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?

buildsjets• 3 months ago

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard (yes really) do this, but not just for people who buy tickets to the show. They have 444 concerts up on Archive.org for free to all.

https://archive.org/details/KingGizzardAndTheLizardWizard

Plenty of other artists have free concert archives at https://archive.org/details/etree

kanemcgrath• 3 months ago

since they have been doing orchestral performances, getting to hear the orchestral versions of their old songs has been amazing.

soneil2• 3 months ago

Sigur Ros have a surprising number of shows on their ftp, which is delightfully retro.

lordfosco• 3 months ago

There was a German startup called Bleecker Street [1] about a decade ago that did exactly that. They toured with artists like Chris Rea, Simple Minds, and Mark Knopfler, tapping directly into the FOH desk at each venue. They would mix the audio live, even adding the ambient noise of the crowd to capture the live feeling.

Right after the show, you could buy fancy looking USB sticks, designed with unique elements of the artists, pre-loaded with the recording of the set you had just heard.

I still have a guitar-shaped USB stick from a Mark Knopfler show at a small venue in a tiny town in southern Germany. Honestly, it’s a far better souvenir than any picture I could have taken.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150205231438/http://www.bleeck...

MilkLizard• 3 months ago

Metallica does or did this. I still have some mp3 of the shows I saw years ago.

FatherOfCurses• 3 months ago

I wonder if a band could put together a live stream concert published to a private stream sent to a movie theater. A bunch of fans of the band could get together and have the concert experience with fellow fans but not have to pay as much as an in-person concert. Movie theaters would have another way to get people in the door.

itintheory• 3 months ago

This definitely happens. Last time Dead & Company came to town, it was simulcast in the local movie theater. Tickets to the show were only available on a raffle basis since the venue didn't hold nearly enough people.

Then again, the Dead were also pioneers of permitting and encouraging the bootleg scene.

Thlom• 3 months ago

There was a push in the cinema industry a few years back to get more into live events, concerts and stuff like that, but seems like it didn't really take off like they wanted.

xoxxala• 3 months ago

I'm reading this article and Weird Al's Don't Download this Song pops up on random play. Did Microsoft add Copilot to Media Player or something?

"Don't download this song (Don't do it, no, no) Even Lars Ulrich knows it's wrong (You can just ask him)"

loloquwowndueo• 3 months ago

Windows, right? If so, that’s your problem. Your computer is controlled by someone else.

(Just being snarky btw lol)

darknavi• 3 months ago

I enjoyed "live albums" a lot growing up.

The Mark, Tom, and Travis show was always a blast to listen to with my friends.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mark,_Tom,_and_Travis_Show...!)

dfxm124• 3 months ago

HN thinks the exclamation point is punctuation and not part of the URL. Luckily wikipedia has a redirect already set up that will work: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Mark,_Tom,_an...

nticompass• 3 months ago

This was one of the first - if not the first - CD I bought for myself, using my own (allowance) money! I was probably too young to listen to it, but blink-182 is my favorite band and I listened to this CD so many times that I pretty much memorized all the stupid banter between tracks.

I also liked sharing certain tracks with my friends when they came over...

tiahura2• 3 months ago

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?

tracker13• 3 months ago

Maybe... however, most bands tend to drift a LOT from the studio versions of songs while touring.

tiahura2• 3 months ago

I'm referring to the pre-concert, when they're just playing a mixtape of whatever through the board. Compare studio recording of whatever and the audience recording.

reenorap• 3 months ago

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

dfxm124• 3 months ago

There was lots of "tape trading" back then. Video too. Foreign TV shows, regional programming, etc. If not technically Internet material, i think this is certainly in the spirit of the Internet Archive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_trading

conductr• 3 months ago

Late 90s there were some great IRC channels for this. I was pretty active in one that revolved around a genre that I most enjoyed.

anjel4• 3 months ago

They called 'em Tape Trees, way back then, which begat ETree.org

criddell• 3 months ago

he has to use anachronistic cassette decks to play the tapes, which get converted into digital files

Anachronistic?

It seems like a complicated way of saying "the tapes were digitized".

FarmerPotato• 3 months ago

Yeah, anachronism means 'not belonging to the time period'. If you made a 1980s movie and had the protagonist transfer cassettes to a laptop via USB interface, THAT would be an anachronism.

I think the author meant "old-fashioned" or "obsolete". Though using a cassette deck to read cassettes, geez, what else are you going to do? Build your own using an Arduino?

rolph5• 3 months ago

if you really want to hear a live performance, there seems to be a nudge from amazon lately.

if your into providing music, dont default to a live version.

some live recordings are good, you can actually hear the music, and the crowd is only noticble between songs.

im thinking that an online archive of live concerts will only steepen this trend.

im just going back to all my mp3 media more often nowadays [bcz i actually bought it mp3 versions, decades ago when you still could]

that way i can hear music, instead of a bunch of people screaming over the music.

now heres somthing else, maybe you remember that concert, you were there, you love hearing you and friends at the concert, maybe people who no longer live are still there. jimmy dean, rock on,

tracker13• 3 months ago

I have a friend that used to record a lot of concerts... a surprising number of bands would even let him plug into the panel to do so. IIRC, mostly using a digital tape recorder later transferred to computer over firewire in the late 90s and 00s.

Tor3• 3 months ago

A friend (who has unfortunately passed away) owned, together with his father, just about every opera CD ever made (his father worked in RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana) and was also an opera fanatic). So, in order to get more opera he used to go to opera performances and record them. When the season opened he would go regularly to e.g. La Scala in Milan, and record the performances. That wasn't actually allowed, but the people there knew him and they knew why he did it (for personal use only), and let him in. To be at the best recording place he would have to get a seat in a section which required that he wore a suit, so he would often wear a smoking - which he actually hated, but he could put a microphone on each collar and get a stereo recording. In the nineties he used a DAT recorder.

schwartzworld• 3 months ago

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• 3 months ago

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.

acomjean2• 3 months ago

As a student in the 90s I worked security for the student concert group on campus. We had to frisk people for Jello Briafa (Dead Kennedys) spoken word performance. I found a couple of tape decks, but those were allowed.

They still put a lot of effort sometimes. I saw Dave Chapelle in NYC and they made us put our phones in these pouches which were unsealed on exiting the show.

wileydragonfly3• 3 months ago

“I don’t have a phone”

rigonkulous10• 3 months ago

I am an active and enthusiastic recordist and have decades of stuff I've accumulated over the years.

One of the concerts I captured in the 90's, lives on as a bootleg which I often see around the scene of this one particularly great live electronic dance band, whose punters have created true value out of the hour and a half of live concert input I managed to record, standing right there front stage and center, with the band looking right at me.

It was a hilarious experience - I expected to get booted out pretty fast, so I held my ground as still as I could, DAT-tape rolling by, shotgun mike held in front of me like it was just normal, as if I belonged there.

The lead singer caught my eye and gave me a wide grin. I survived the concert, it was awesome, but boy was I relieved to have made it home with that DAT - which I of course, proceeded to digitize with my brand new spdf/io ..

The next year the band (who are big and famous, btw) were in the same city and I happened to be around, I got invited backstage to meet the band, participate in a bit of nerdery regarding their live setup and gear and so on, and talk about that recording I'd made.

I'd put it out as a pure bootleg, no questions asked.

Turns out they'd heard it and enjoyed it and came to appreciate the nature of their bootleggers, as avid fans who gave the band themselves something extra to think about in what was then, a burgeoning digital/online universe about to explode.

So, seeing it around, almost 30 years now .. here and there, again and again .. is quite hilarious. Youtube often recommends it to me in my playlist, its just there.

And at a certain spot in the recording, I tell my mate to stop standing so close to me (he was blocking the shottie), and prepare for my ass getting bounced - which never happened, thankfully.

So yeah, I just wanna say, if you personally have the desire to be a recordist, and have a pure purpose in it, I'd say just freakin' go for it.

Record All The Things.

Its good for the Artists, yo. And also their fans. (Its how we get rid of the managers, cough cough..)

erickhill• 3 months ago

I loved reading this with the still built-in caginess around all the identifying details. Just in case!

whompyjaw• 3 months ago

What is a "punter"?

stavros• 3 months ago

Customer/fan/concertgoer.

nutjob2• 3 months ago

In this case, an attendee to the concert.

More generally someone on the buying/risk side of a transaction.

rolph5• 3 months ago

also common UK slang, for someone who constantly does things in the grey.

to wit: scammer, scheister, player.

lostlogin2• 3 months ago

The one pushing the boat along.

tyrust3• 3 months ago

Great story, but how are you going to say all that but not link to the recording?

wahern2• 3 months ago

It's still technically illegal. And I wouldn't be surprised if there's a tacit Don't Ask, Don't Tell understanding in the community between artists and recorders. Even when individual recorders are known by the community and artists, keeping the pretense of anonymity might be important to preserving and protecting the scene.

samplatt2• 3 months ago

Based on the story there's a good chance it'll be one of these recordings: https://relisten.net/grateful-dead

dackdel• 3 months ago

seek your soul and you will find the recordings

lostlogin2• 3 months ago

Or the band?

rigonkulous10• 3 months ago

I needed to get back to work, sorry about that. ;)

Here you go:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXBEsPy1SSo

9999000009992• 3 months ago

We shouldn’t need the managers, but the record industry does everything it can to consolidate everything.

However, I do notice that for more uncommon music, the record industry sort it just looks the other way. For example Eminem has tons of really old music on YouTube that I’m sure his lawyers could figure out how to get taken down. But it just stays up.

I would really like music copyright to change within my lifetime. It should realistically be 30 years from first release, and after that it should go straight to the public domain. By then everyone’s made their money. Even Elvis won’t be public domain until like 2050 or 2060. I don’t really think he needs the money right now.

euroderf• 3 months ago

the record industry does everything it can to consolidate everything.

Financialization ? Productize, promote, push ?

tempaccount50502• 3 months ago

I agree mostly but take issue with "not needing managers". As someone who went from split shows to big venues to touring, managers (good ones) are a godsend.

Will there be convenient parking?

Do they have adequate power?

Is the stage big enough?

Do we need to book sound?

Is there a weather contingency?

Where can we sleep?

What time is load in?

What time is sound check?

What form of payment?

How will they be advertising?

Who do we give promotional materials to?

Etc etc. Having someone take care of all this stuff allows us to focus on practicing and recording (which has another long list of questions that need to be addressed).

Not to mention networking and venue access. Put all that stuff together and it's a full time job that artists are poorly equipped to handle.

volkl483• 3 months ago

However, I do notice that for more uncommon music, the record industry sort it just looks the other way. For example Eminem has tons of really old music on YouTube that I’m sure his lawyers could figure out how to get taken down. But it just stays up.

Or artists that have seen the merit in tolerating it/somewhat encouraging it. I'm a pretty hardcore Nine Inch Nails fan (seen >30 shows).

NINLive.com is a fantastic (unofficial) archive for our community. Close to 2k individual recordings, about 3/4 of all shows they've ever played have at least one recording.

NIN's camp is fully aware, the guy who runs the site has gotten invited to meet the band before. (And NIN has tossed unedited pro-shot tour footage to the fans before to play with, as well as things like directly linking to a fan-compiled concert film for another tour on their own home page).

rigonkulous10• 3 months ago

I am an artist who firmly does not believe in copyright - that all art must be copied in order to persist, or else it dies.

Really, I'm fine with it.

Musicians make money with their gigs, and that is how it should be.

Always throw a coin at live musicians, folks. They deserve it.

augusto-moura• 3 months ago

You made me curious about the recording, could you share the youtube link for it? Only if you are comfortable with it, ofc

rigonkulous10• 3 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXBEsPy1SSo

jjulius2• 3 months ago

As a huge fan of the type of music you're probably describing, I'd love to know what artist/recording you're referring to here. Surely with the band's blessing and ~30 years of time passed, it'd be okay to divulge...

brightbeige• 3 months ago

Not OP, but my guess is Underworld.

Edit: or Erasure?

lukan2• 3 months ago

"Record All The Things."

Unless you use a crappy smartphone with a bright annoying screen ..

TYPE_FASTER• 3 months ago

Somebody whipped out a freakin iPad and started recording video in front of me once. Like wtf

rigonkulous10• 3 months ago

Doesn't matter, still got the capture.

You'll get it.

Just do it.

hungryhobbit• 3 months ago

Great project, but it has an absolutely TERRIBLE UI. Please, if you love audio enough to put in the 95% of effort to get the files to the web, don't let everyone down with an atrocious interface to actually access those files.

Please, get someone who knows about usability or building web UIs to help you!

anjel4• 3 months ago

Archive.org always made puzzling UI choices, not really sure why, but its a long running trend thats not likely to change. Such that for larger Band repos, fans stepped in and made their own front ends:

1. https://www.gdao.org/

2. https://dlr2008.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/on-public-access-to...

3. https://relisten.net/grateful-dead

Clearly this tape stash is worthy of similar treatment. Also of note for live music fans and collectors: Legendary Long Island Radio Station WLIR Live Show Archives:

https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22WLIR%22

block_dagger2• 3 months ago

Thats why projects like Relisten exist

https://relisten.net

brightball• 3 months ago

I talked to a big Grateful Dead fan the other day and he told me that they had special areas setup for anybody who wanted to record. They were happy to let people share.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS2• 3 months ago

Yep, the tapers section. At some shows you could get a soundboard feed.

I was a teenager at the last show I was at, and I always envied thise guys.

wallst07• 3 months ago

Yup, same as Phish.

I used to buy VHS tapes of live Phish recordings from the person at the show. VHS because of the fidelity I guess.

lb1lf• 3 months ago

Haha, I can relate. Dabbled both with live recording (using a Sony PCM-M1 and a pair of very unobtrusive capsule mikes if the venue and band didn't have an enlightened recording policy, a DA-P1 and a pair of 416s if they did) and photograpy (mostly a Nikon F3 and a 105mm f/2.5).

I got VERY good at quickly rewinding a film roll and slipping it in the hands of a nearby friend in case security spotted me and wanted to nick my film. Always had a handful of empty film rolls to give up (seemingly reluctantly)

Worst scare I had was when taping Ray Charles at a jazz festival in Norway c.2000, methinks. Well into the show, he exclaims that some ass is taping his show, and he's not too happy about it. Starts explaining he's not going to play on until he's got that tape in his hands!

I glance around, rather nervously, but noone is heading for me - so I just keep recording, hoping that someone else is on the hook. Lo and behold, moments later a stage hand comes on stage with what appeared to be a broadcast video tape, giving it to a triumphant Ray Charles who sits down and starts playing again. Phew!

rigonkulous10• 3 months ago

Great story! high five Oh wait, you probably couldn't high-5 Ray, lol ..

bilekas• 3 months ago

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...

sdellis• 3 months ago

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.

bityard• 3 months ago

Yeah, there is some popular misunderstanding about what IPFS is... a lot of people seem to think its essentially free or subsidized distributed cloud storage. But the more you dig into it, the more you realize it's just a fairly inefficient caching system.

LOCKSS looks interesting but it seems like it's exclusively for libraries.

badlibrarian• 3 months ago

I can find no current public document from the Internet Archive explaining what is backed up, where, or at what redundancy level.

From a 2016 blog post:

"Do you do backups too, for example to guard against corrupt data getting mirrored across both copies, or accidental deletion?"

John Gonzalez, the author and IA infrastructure lead, replied:

"We have done experiments to confirm that we can back up large portions of our corpus... but this is not a regular practice for us at this time."

https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/25/20000-hard-drives-on-a-m...

boomboomsubban• 3 months ago

IA makes torrents for basically everything on it's site.

WalterBright• 3 months ago

Many software companies in the 80s were quiet about their software being bootlegged because it turned out to be great for building a critical mass of users of their software.

strickinato• 3 months ago

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• 3 months ago

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.

ilamont4• 3 months ago

I also think there's a lot to learn from the book about DIY for any startup or community organizer.

The parallels with being in a band and a startup are real. Azerrad says many times in the book that what these bands were doing was entrepreneurial.

charcircuit2• 3 months ago

listen now

These are dangerous words to use for an archive site for material still protected under copyright.

darkstarsys• 3 months ago

But what about copyright? Asking for a friend.

sph• 3 months ago

My friend Sam Altman said not to worry.

incompatible• 3 months ago

Is a takedown demand the worse thing that can happen?

bguberfain• 3 months ago

Not to demerit the recording, but I felt more nostalgic for the last sentence of the article "Sometimes, the internet is good" than for the musics itself.

ilamont4• 3 months ago

On the afternoon of October 6 1989 I attended a Fugazi concert in Cambridge Mass, probably one of the best live shows I've ever seen.

Last year I casually searched YouTube for some shows I had attended in my youth and this one popped up, recorded by a high school classmate who happened to be there, filming from the side from a balcony or rope rack used by stagehands.

I then went to the Fugazi Live Series archive to see if there was better quality audio (the band recorded most of their shows from the 1980s through the early 2000s, and posted almost all of them in the archive). That October 1989 concert was in the database (https://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series/cambridge-ma-usa-100...), and there were some comments by others who attended, but there was no supporting media other than a single photograph.

So I emailed the address on the website:

Hi, regarding this show someone created a video recording from which the audio can probably be extracted. It's on YouTube here:

https://youtu.be/0XS3QD2cddo?si=1TM9PglNv-Rlr98w

I was at the show but not near the stage. It was a memorable show for me and many others according to the description on the official Fugazi archive.

The uploader of the video (my high school classmate, who I believe was a member of the FUs at some point) says:

"In 1989, I went to the First Congregational Church, In Harvard Sq. Cambridge Massachusetts, in hopes of getting into this Fugazi show. Unfortunately, the promoter pre-sold the tickets to people he knew. Thus there was a large crowd of people trying to get in without tickets. Fortunately for me, I had been friends with him before, and he let my girlfriend and I in. Once inside, I asked Guy if I could videotape the show, he told me to go ahead... as long as I sent a copy of the video to Dischord Records... I never did... I just wasn't responsible enough in those days to bother... anyway, here it is, the full show, in all it's faded and low resolution glory... so go ahead, enjoy, and share."

To my surprise, Ian MacKaye responded! While he could extract the audio from YouTube, he wanted to know if I could get in touch with my high school classmate who might still have the original tapes which would have better quality. I did, and my classmate actually got the tapes (from his old girlfriend, who had them in a box in her basement) and shipped them off to Ian. At some point they will be properly digitized and put on the Fugazi archive.

I had a long interview with Ian about archiving which I hope to post on my blog later this summer. To make a long story short, he's amassed a huge collection of materials from Fugazi and his previous bands (most notably Minor Threat) which includes concert audio, studio audio, video, photos, concert flyers, and every piece of fan mail they received at Dischord House from the 1980s to the present day.

He's very systematic about organizing the archives, thanks to interactions with trained archivists including several working for the federal government (he's based in Washington DC).

dfxm124• 3 months ago

What's your blog?

Minor Threat was before my time, but I've seen Fugazi and The Evens a few times. Ian always puts on a great show. He seems like a really thoughtful, detail oriented guy. I'm not surprised that he keeps organized archives or that he found the time to respond.

ilamont4• 3 months ago

My blog is related to my genealogy business, not music. But the story about archiving old audio and video is relevant to the struggle of many genealogists to preserve old media, a frequent topic on the blog:

https://easygenie.org/search?q=media&options%5Bprefix%5D=las...

mmmlinux• 3 months ago

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.

SoleilAbsolu• 3 months ago

Wow, this is very cool, I have been looking for the Phish show at Lounge Ax from November 1990 (opening for Alex Chilton of Big Star) for ages. It was first time I saw them live, and next time they came around they graduated from a 300 person club to a 3000 person ballroom!

everyone• 3 months ago

I used to record concerts I went to with a minidisc player and a small battery powered mic.. I have Beck, Radiohead, Dj Shadow, Kid koala, Q-bert. Defo fun to listen back to, especially the bullshit my friends and I were saying.

Also there was a shop in Temple Bar Dublin that seemed to specialise in selling bootlegs. They were really expensive, but really good, clearly taken from the sound desk.

lastdong• 3 months ago

This brings back some memories. I often recorded live gigs from the radio. It was the best way to discover new bands and share them with friends at parties. The Internet Archive keeps on giving, what a great project.

standardly2• 3 months ago

Some great commentary in here. I agree all games have loops, so the authors stance against them comes off as a bit confusing.

I think what the author is getting at is when loops are obviosuly "felt" and feel canned.

Strategy games typically have obvious, tight loops. Turn-based games are loop-driven by definition. And so on. This is fine.

But single player games, single player RPGs, etc, can suffer if the loop is really tight and obvious. Early on, you feel "oh, i get it. it's going to be 40 more hours of THIS". Novelty wears off if the loop doesn't really change or evolve. Whereas in turn-based games or strategy-based games, the loop itself IS the game because it progresses as the game state evolves. Nobody complains about the game-loop of chess because that's the game - if you don't like the loop, you don't like the game and the convo ends there, is what is is. But a single-player adventure game, for example, has to do a lot of other stuff right to keep a player incentivized to keep playing the "loop".

Best example would be BG3, where theres clearly a loop - but its massive. Theres a LOT of variation and events between leaving camp and returning later that night. So each "loop" rarely feels samey.

I think the issue is when gameplay loops become transparent and predictable rather than maintaining novelty. A LOT of games suffer for this - the type of game you agree is good, you enjoy it, but put it down after 12 hours for some reason. It's bc of this. The human brain seeks novelty.

pimlottc4• 3 months ago

You probably meant to reply to a different post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47764164

standardly2• 3 months ago

No clue how that happened. Epic fail. Not even pasting my comment there, just going to let it die.

cold_tom• 3 months ago

This is one of those cases where preservation clashes with ownership. Without this, a lot of those recordings would just disappear.But at the same time, they’re not really his to share. Hard to draw a clean line here.

LightBug1• 3 months ago

Breathlessly cannot wait to share some of this stuff with my people ...

This is what the internet is for.

THANK YOU.

soneil2• 3 months ago

2100 entries over 40 years is pretty much a show a week. Talk about artefacts of a life well lived.

__fst__• 3 months ago

Just browsed through the available Audio collections on the Internet Archive. There's probably more music available than I can listen in my lifetime. No need for audio subscriptions for me. Its fun to browse and explore and I like the sequential listening experience of the LPs.

sailfast• 3 months ago

How did they make these tapes sound so incredible? I'm getting more fidelity out of these tapes than just about any cassette I've ever listened to - even new in the shrink wrap. Amazing.

This is like all of the great shows I couldn't go to in my childhood. Incredible.

so-cal-schemer• 3 months ago

  Play from: 'Webamp'

is mandatory.

tokioyoyo• 3 months ago

Late to the party, but if anyone gets a chance, look up 80s/90s nightlife in San Francisco, New York, Montreal, Toronto and so on. We lost a lot.

crashbunny• 3 months ago

Kind of loosely related to the article. Many years ago someone uploaded to youtube an old video of Neil Young going into a record store and finding a bootleg vinyl of one of his concerts for sale.

I think this is the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdOITpaQvZI "This is a part from autobiographical film Neil made in 1972."

I found the video fascinating and thinking about how and who made these bootlegs is a fascinating mystery to me. It would have to someone in the industry with lots of contacts to get it made and distributed.

pcblues• 3 months ago

I bought bootleg CDs of nirvana when I was at uni in the 1990s. Always disappointed. At their most wasted.

Lorin• 3 months ago

I desperately miss PureDJ online radio, pretty much exclusively streamed EDM DJ sets. Would do anything to see the archive restored in some fashion.

washadjeffmad• 3 months ago

I'm heartened that so much tape is still around. The lot of digital is often binary - it exists or it doesn't, but even a shred of flaking analog media can retain complete information.

I was a member of a few tape sharing communities at the turn of the millennium and spent those years digitizing scores of board and bootleg live recordings (APE or FLAC... the great debate). We'd trade our strategies for getting gear into shows, who was working door and board and was cool with what, stories of getting caught. When recorders got small enough, we started sneaking MiniDisc players into venues with microphones down our sleeves for stereo. I've still got a few stacks of those.

Leading up to that, at the dawn of LAME, I was doing the same over on IRC. Everyone with an fserve had a few tracks or albums of their favorite bands, tons local with no other distribution, and you could always message them for more info. There was a lot of love, and I found a lot of great people across the world that way.

When the RIAA crackdowns started, I archived as much as I could but lost everything in the mid-2000s when a Windows upgrade overwrote my external storage. The irony that hundreds of gigs (of both kids) would have survived if I'd put them on tape hasn't eluded me.

saysjonathan• 3 months ago

The National put out a official 'bootleg' recording of two nights of concerts using the Mike "the Mike" Millard method, called Juicy Sonic Magic[0]. Only physically released on triple cassette though I think you can stream it. Sort of tangential to this conversation but it really captures the energy of a live show in a completely different way. Highly recommend checking out if you're a fan of the band, old bootleg recording techniques, or live recordings in general.

0: https://www.discogs.com/master/1664187-The-National-Juicy-So...

dhruv3006• 3 months ago

This is a beauty!

m463• 3 months ago

I remember reading that maybe steve jobs learned a lot from a video of the beatles practicing together (or was it in person?)

I've always wondered if that was available somewhere.

Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive

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