The Grateful Dead allowed fans to tape their live shows. The conventional wisdom stated that the band was losing money by not charging and protecting the songs. But Jerry Garcia didn’t agree. He said that once they were done playing the notes, they had no use for them. They’d served their purpose and the fans could do with them as they wished. That’s how taping sections were born.
Taping sections were groups of people who would set up in a designated area at the live Dead shows to record the show. The tapers would then make copies of their recordings and trade them with other fans who would make copies and send them out into what grew into an enormous music genome project long before Pandora.
As long as people didn’t profit from the recordings, they were free to trade as they wished. And by allowing this, the band allowed it’s network of fans to grow and expand beyond the gates of each performance. They saw their fans become ambassadors and a show that was otherwise lost to time and memory was now a sales tool for brand evangelists singing the praises of the band’s live shows. By showing restraint and not trying to squeeze every last buck from the band’s music, they gave some of it away and facilitated the creation of a culture.
The Grateful Dead realized that the value of a fan or customer over time is far greater than the profit margin on a single ticket sale. For that, I would count the Dead and their fans, the Deadheads themselves, as brilliant pioneers in the world of viral marketing.
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Tags: Grateful Dead, music genome, taping section, viral, viral marketing
