N.Y. Times Archive Article

Jeff Leeds
New York Times News Service
Nov. 29, 2005 06:10 PM

The Grateful Dead, the business, is testing the loyalty of longtime
fans of the Grateful Dead, the pioneering jam band, by cracking down on
an independently run Web site that made thousands of recordings of its
live concerts available for free downloading.

The band recently asked the operators of the popular Live Music Archive
(archive.org) to make the concert recordings - a staple of Grateful
Dead fandom - available only for listening online, the band's
spokesman, Dennis McNally, said Tuesday. In the meantime, the files
that previously had been freely downloaded were taken down from the
site last week.

Dissent has been building rapidly, however, as the band's fans - known
as Deadheads - have discovered the recordings are, at least for the
time being, not available. Already, fans have started an online
petition, at www.petitiononline.com/gdm/petition.html, threatening to
boycott the band's recordings and merchandise if the decision is not
reversed. In particular, fans have expressed outrage that the shift
covers not only the semiofficial "soundboard" recordings made by
technicians at the band's performances, but also recordings made by
audience members.
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To the fans, the move signals a profound philosophical shift for a band
that had been famous for encouraging fans to record and trade
live-concert tapes. The band even cordoned off a special area at its
shows, usually near the soundboard, for "tapers" - a practice now
followed by many younger jam bands.

But more broadly, it suggests that a touchstone of baby-boomer
counterculture - the recording made by and shared, sometimes via mail,
among hard-core fans - may be subverted in a digital era when music
files can be instantly transmitted worldwide.

The move comes as the group, which disbanded after the 1995 death of
its leader and ringmaster, Jerry Garcia, has begun selling downloads of
its live concerts through its own official Web site. The band (whose
surviving members - the guitarist Bob Weir, the bassist Phil Lesh and
the drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann - have since played
together under the more compact name the Dead) sells album-length
recordings of the shows at prices that can run from about $8 to roughly
$16 a copy.

Unlike the digital files sold at popular music services like Apple
Computer's iTunes or Real Networks' Rhapsody, the band sells its music
as files that can be copied and transferred without restriction.

The independently operated Live Music Archive evidently posed unwelcome
competition.

"These folks assembled a Deadhead's dream collection and made it
available," McNally said. "When we discovered it, we decided to take a
wait-and-see approach. Eventually, it was the band's conclusion, after
a long discussion with them, to request that they change their
policies" and make the live recordings available only as streams.

The contretemps makes clear that the band's decades-long support of fan
recordings and trading did not anticipate the popularity of music
online.

"One-to-one community building, tape trading, is something we've always
been about," McNally said. "The idea of a massive one-stop Web site
that does not build community is not what we had in mind. Our
conclusion has been that it doesn't represent Grateful Dead values."

Most fans, he continued, "understand they were being granted an
extraordinary privilege, and they responded by taking it very
seriously" by respecting the band's wishes not to sell their live
recordings. "This is not the same situation," he added.

David Gans, who is the host of a syndicated radio program, "The
Grateful Dead Hour," said in an interview Tuesday that the battle was
rooted in the band's "historically lackadaisical attitude toward their
intellectual property." He added: "When they were making $50 million a
year on the road, there wasn't a lot of pressure to monetize their
archives." Now, however, it may be difficult to put the genie back in
the bottle. While the move to revise the Live Music Archive may deal a
blow to what many fans considered an organized library of material,
"the idea that they could stop people from trading these files is
absurd," Gans said, adding: "It's no longer under anyone's control.
People have gigabytes of this stuff."

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