Turns Out Home Taping Wasn’t Killing Music After All

For decades, the music and film industries have generally responded the same way to the emergence of any new technology capable of recording and distributing content: with a barrage of hostility. Many readers will remember the legal campaign against (alleged) file sharers conducted by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) during the 2000s, and perhaps also earlier campaigns around “illegal” video cassettes, copying video games, and so on. The industry’s bugbear back in the early and mid-1980s was the audio cassette, and their response to its ubiquity was the “Home Taping Is Killing Music” campaign, which launched in 1981 and spent several years trying to shame, litigate, and generally browbeat fans into refraining from recording their favorite music onto the format. But it turns out that one plucky Chicagoan was blithely ignoring the rhetoric—and in doing so, he was creating the beginnings of an archive that would end up spanning multiple decades and do more to preserve generations’ worth of music than the RIAA et al would ever do. Aadam Jacobs first took his Dictaphone to a show in May 1984, when he ventured to a venue called the Arts Bar to see British free jazz ps