Topic How did this site start?
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I recently got to talk to Giovanni *fan girl scream*.
He pointed out that not many people really understand what goes into this site, and maintaining Loveline’s history. So could Spinfly and Giovanni, please explain how this happened, how it started, and what work is put into all of this?
From the FAQ:
For most of Loveline’s history, Westwood One (the studio that produced Loveline) did not keep studio recordings of the show. Amateur recordings from thousands of fans across the country are the only known copies of the show. Over the years, an underground community of Loveline fanatics has sprung up. They record, collect, and trade shows with one another.
lovelinetapes.com is a community effort to collect, organize, and share recordings of these old Loveline radio shows. The site makes them searchable, distributes them in an organized way, and encourages interaction between Loveline fans. The site launched in October 2009.
We have shows recorded from radio broadcasts between 1989 and 2005, almost exclusively from the Adam Carolla era. Of the 3,240 (66.7%) of them have recordings. Since we don’t have a complete broadcast schedule from the early years of Loveline, it’s likely that we have something like 30% of all shows broadcast from 1989 to 2005.
For legal reasons, we cannot post any shows after 2005. Westwood One makes those shows available on the official Loveline web site with a paid membership.
And let’s also applaud the hard work everyone, especially Giovanni has done to maintain these files, and Spinfly for doing the magic website stuff.
In 2009, unclepenny stumbled onto a page on my personal website which described how I was a Loveline fan and had some video footage from a documentary shoot in college. After I told him that I also had a box full of Loveline recordings from the 90’s, he excitedly asked me to share them and introduced me to Giovanni. It was at this point that I became aware of the relative rarity and demand for these recorded shows.
For a number of years, I had been kicking around the idea of making a site to share all of these old recordings with the world. After learning about the community out there and how difficult it was to share these recordings, I decided that this was the time to do it.
I told unclepenny and Giovanni that I would send in my box of tapes under three conditions:
a) they digitize all of my recordings and send them back to me,
b) they send me ALL OTHER digital recordings they had ever collected, and
c) they help me build a site.They agreed, and I got to work. It took a lot of time getting functional site up and running, and even more time warding off hackers who suck all the bandwidth (I pay for all this out of my own pocket), but I think we’re in a pretty good place now. The site currently has about 13,000 unique visitors a month.
There have been a few enhancements over the years, but my day job and freelance work have made difficult for me to devote as much time to the site that I would like. A special apology goes out to davevsdave, who has spent a lot of time putting together a new design for the site that I have just not had a chance to put out there. It’s coming…
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