NYT: Deadheads Must Be Satisfied With 1,300 Audience Tapings

The Annals of Open Source Culture:
Although I supose one shouldn't look a Dead horse in the mouth, it's nonetheless unfortunate that the Dead are now placing limits on access to recordings of their live performances.



cf. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/30/arts/music/30dead.html


December 2, 2005
Deadheads Must Be Satisfied With 1,300 Audience Tapings


By JEFF LEEDS
Responding to a rising revolt from its famously loyal fans, the Grateful Dead has partly reversed a decision to prohibit fans from downloading free copies of live-concert recordings.

The shift, announced late Wednesday by the band's spokesman, Dennis McNally, means that the Live Music Archive, part of the independent Web site archive.org, will once again allow the band's followers to download recordings made by audience members at their performances. But high-quality live recordings made from the band's concert soundboard will be available only for online listening, not downloading.

Brewster Kahle, a digital librarian at the Internet archive, said yesterday that the audience-made recordings - which number more than 1,300 - had been made available for downloading. He added that the coveted soundboard recordings would be on the site and available for listening in the next few days. The total number of Grateful Dead recordings on the site is expected to number roughly 3,000.

For decades, the Grateful Dead has encouraged its fans - Deadheads - to record its live shows and trade tapes. But its lucrative touring days ended when the band disbanded in 1995 after the death of its guitarist and lead singer, Jerry Garcia. And so sales of the band's music, especially digital music in the era of iTunes, became increasingly important to its bottom line, as did sales of other Grateful Dead merchandise.

In the last several months, the band began selling downloads of its performances through its own official Web site, dead.net. And the week before Thanksgiving, representatives of the band asked the Live Music Archive to remove the recordings of the band's work.

The removal of the files stirred outrage among fans, and the furor and partial reversal exposed disagreements over business philosophy among the band's surviving members.

In an e-mail statement yesterday, Mickey Hart, one of the band's drummers, said, "I was one of the first supporters of the tapers and the creation of the Grateful Dead taping policies and I continue to believe that the tapers play an important role in expanding our community."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company