The Grateful Dead, Phil Lesh and Friends, and Smashing Pumpkins are just a few artists whose concerts live on in the Live Music Archive, which just recently cracked a whopping 250,000 recordings.
Over the last 20 years or so, Internet Archive staff and music-loving volunteers have compiled various concert footage on the Live Music Archive for viewers to watch and listen to freely. Now, nearly 30 items are uploaded to the Live Music Archive each day, which now takes up more than 250 terabytes of data on Internet Archive servers.
“It’s a huge victory for the open web,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle said in a statement. “Fans have helped build it. Bands have supported it. And the Internet Archive has continued to scale it to be able to meet the demand.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Live Music Archive is particularly heavy with jam band footage, including highlight performances from String Cheese Incident, Umphrey’s McGee, Disco Biscuits, and more. But if that’s not your thing, you can also peruse recordings from artists like Elliott Smith, My Morning Jacket, Jack Johnson, Ween, and Drive-By Truckers.
“It shouldn’t cost to give something away,” Kahle adds. “We wanted to make it possible for people to make things permanently available without having to sell their souls to a platform that is going to exploit it for advertising. That just seemed like the world that should exist, and we thought we could play a role.”
There are simply way too many artists featured in the Live Music Archive to list out, so you can peruse for yourself here, and read more about the archive’s history here.
