Intro and Origins
Radio Nowhere is a project with the goal of providing a publicly available archive of Bruce Springsteen’s concert recordings on archive.org. Hopefully long-term, which I will get into later.
This project formally started in May 2024 when the archive collection was created. I figured a proper collection would make organizing things much, much easier. The initial goal was to upload my sizable collection of Bruce bootlegs, and provide a hopefully long-term home for them.
A project like this has been on my mind for a number of years now, for reasons which I’ll explain more in a bit. The main thing stopping it until now was not having a place for it. I’d have to find somewhere to host the files, which would get pricey depending on how much space this ends up requiring.
For anyone wondering, most cloud storage sites charge anywhere from $5-15/TB per month. A rough estimate is that this project will end up somewhere around 2TB with the initial goal of 1 tape per show. Currently, the collection is at 1,267 unique tapes, and totalling around 1.5TB of space.
Of course with cloud storage, there are a number of issues that could affect the long-term goal of this project. Price is definitely one of them (which would add up overtime). And of course there is the concern of going past account limits and the provider disabling the account (or worse, deleting it.)
I suppose there are other options like a massive community torrent, or self-hosting on my own server. But those have pros/cons of their own as well, longevity and cost among them.
I figured that Archive.org would be the best place for something like this, as they are already home to a similar project named the LiveMusicArchive.
Inspiration Move Me Brightly
The LiveMusicArchive is a project which acts as a repository for tapes of bands like the Grateful Dead, Phish, and many others. These tapes are available to stream, as well as download in many cases.
Now, the ideal solution would just be to request that they’d add this collection of Bruce shows. But, and somewhat crucially, the LMA focuses on “tape/trade friendly” artists. Bruce isn’t among them, which would prevent his inclusion in something like the LMA. He has never allowed open taping of his shows, and tapers have been kicked out of shows for doing so. This hasn’t stopped them, just made it harder to do so.
More specifically, I was inspired by the Grateful Dead trading community, who have tirelessly worked to have tapes of every single show of theirs freely available, without any caveats.
Why?
As mentioned above, I wanted the Bruce version of the LMA.
As far as I’m aware, there hasn’t ever been a project attempted like this, least of all on this scale, and definitely not openly. As it stands, there are a only a handful of places focused on sharing Bruce bootlegs. Each having their own issues and downsides.
All of them share the same core issue, they weren’t designed to be permanent. For the most part, they’re largely temporary, which is just how things go. All of them are dependent on those with collections to share what they have and fill requests. Most of the time, these uploads are temporary and removed after a period of time. Whether because they were uploaded to a site like WeTransfer (which only keeps files for 3 days), or the link was disabled by the uploader after a similar amount of time.
Of course, the solution to the above is just “upload everything forever”, which is feasible for some but not everyone has that ability. Whether due to funds or just not having space for it.
Conclusion
After explaining the above, there’s no way I can conclude this while claiming that Radio Nowhere is a perfect solution. It would be ridiculous to do so.
The one downside to this project, but what also makes it actually possible, is being fully dependent on the Internet Archive as a platform. Last fall (2024), they had an extended outage due to DDoS attacks that prevented access for over a month. I would hope that nothing like that would happen again, but it is simply unknown.
Hosting this myself would be prohibitively expensive at the current time. Being reliant on an external cloud service (like MEGA) would lead to a whole host of other issues as previously mentioned. Plus, those services could disappear at any time, I’d like to take my chances on the Internet Archive having a better shot.
But, I like to think that this is a start. Perhaps it encourages someone else to start a similar initiative. Maybe that idea about a massive community torrent could happen, or possibly someone with the know-how/resources to host a cloud drive could do just that.
