Celebrating 20 Years of the Live Music Archive

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This week, the Live Music Archive collection at the Internet Archive reaches a milestone – 20 years since the collection was started. The roots of the Live Music Archive collection are visible right in the URL – etree. Did you ever wonder what the “etree” in the URL references? In 1998, the etree music community was created to promote the online trading of lossless audio recordings of live music performances. With the advent of more widely available broadband (by 1990’s standards, mind you) internet connections and the creation of lossless file compression formats (Shorten at first, followed by FLAC), the community established protocols to phone number library ensure the preservation and archiving of these original audio recordings. Preservation and archiving. The very ethos of the Internet Archive.


Early Live Music Archive logo
In July 2002, Jon Aizen, a software engineer at the Internet Archive and live music enthusiast, proposed to Brewster Kahle the idea of archiving live music recordings. Brewster was enthusiastic and so on July 23, 2002, Jon reached out to the etree community via their email list to make an offer. The Internet Archive was offering to provide “unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, forever, for free” to ensure the preservation and easy distribution of these live music recordings. The reply came back: “We don’t believe you.

But if you could, that would be our dream.” And we were off to the races to create the first library archive of lossless, legal, live audio recordings. The first order of business was to get explicit permission from the artists to not only preserve but also make available easy access to their recordings. Aizen and others starting emailing bands and documenting their responses.