Internet Archive hosts growing treasure trove for music lovers

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Any music lover with time to kill needs look no further than the Aadam Jacobs collection, an archive of more than 10,000 local shows recorded by a Chicago obsessive over four decades. Jacobs, 59, made his collection public after judging that he no longer had “enough life” in him to digitise everything he had recorded. A group of volunteers across the world is now restoring and uploading the concerts to the Internet Archive, a process that will take years to complete and requires regular visits to pick up tapes from Jacobs’ home. Gems include early shows by Tracy Chapman, Nirvana, REM and many more obscure artists. The Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library, remains a vital repository for cultural artefacts that might otherwise have been lost. It also hosts 490,000 music files rescued from Myspace when the site was at its peak.