The Story of Loveline Tapes
Loveline Tapes is a community dedicated to collecting, organizing, and sharing classic Loveline radio shows. The site archives them, makes them searchable, and features online forums where Loveline fans can interact with each other. lovelinetapes.com launched in October 2009.
My name is Jeff (spinfly on lovelinetapes.com). I’m a web developer and photographer currently living in Alexandria, Virginia. I started listening to Loveline in the late 1990s while attending the University of Southern California and quickly became a dedicated fan. I loved the show so much that I began recording it on the mini-stereo deck in my dorm room. Like many other nerds out there, I discovered that if I paused during commercial breaks, an entire show could fit neatly onto a 90-minute tape.
In 2009, unclepenny stumbled onto my personal website that mentioned my love for Loveline. When he discovered I had a box full of old Loveline tapes, he excitedly asked me to share them and introduced me to Giovanni, a super fan who had become well-known in the Loveline community.
Throughout most of Loveline’s history, it seems Westwood One (the studio that produced the show) did not make official studio recordings. As a result, amateur recordings from fans are often the only surviving copies. Over time, an underground community of Loveline enthusiasts began collecting and trading these recordings.
Realizing the rarity and demand for tapes like mine, I had an idea. Rather than simply contributing my recordings to the community, I wanted to create a website where we could collect and share all these recordings in an organized way. So I told unclepenny and Giovanni that I would send them my box of tapes under three conditions:
- they digitize all of my recordings and send them back to me,
- they send me ALL OTHER digital recordings they collected, and
- they help me build a site to organize and share these recordings.
They agreed, and I got to work. Building the site took a lot of time and money, and keeping it running involved dealing with hackers and managing bandwidth, but we did it! Special thanks to unclepenny and Giovanni for their help in collecting the initial content, and to our admins for their ongoing work in keeping the site up to date.
In June 2017, our hosting provider temporarily took down the site because it had become too popular. I saw it as an opportunity to rebuild everything from the ground up. In October 2017, we relaunched with a brand-new design and many new features—thanks to davevsdave for his help with the snazzy design.
Today, Loveline Tapes receives around 13,000 unique visitors and 40,000 pageviews each month. While hosting costs have steadily increased, I’m committed to keeping the site up as a public service. Enjoy!