A Sad Day for Deadheads
There is sad news in Grateful Dead land today. We deadheads have had it very very good for a while now. For some time now, Archive.org has provided free high speed distribution infrastructure for over 2000 Grateful Dead shows. These shows included soundboards, audience recordings and studio outtakes in many formats including shn, flac, mp3 and various quality streams. I know many of us shed a tear this morning when we went to queue up our daily dose of the Dead to find that our listening options and selection have been severely limited. For vague reasons Archive.org has removed all soundboards have been removed and audience recordings are now only available in streaming format. Over 1000 shows have been removed from the archive completely. In Archive.org’s official statement, the only explanation given was:
“Based on discussions with many involved, the Internet Archive has been asked to change how the Grateful Dead concert recordings are being distributed on the Archive site for the time being.”
My first reaction to this was anger and sadness due to my sense of entitlement. After all, Jerry himself on more than one occassion said “Once we play it, its yours.” I wonder how Jerry would feel about that now, knowing that most of the music he played was completely available for anyone to listen to anytime they wanted. This is almost definitely a decision made by Grateful Dead Productions so that they can charge for downloads of shows. They’ve been releasing a new show for download every month for the past eight months via the GDStore.
David Gans, host of the Grateful Dead Hour, had a wonderful post that put things into perspective for me. The fact is that the music doesn’t belong to us and we aren’t entitled to it. We have just been spoiled by the free trading of shows for so long that we have a sense of entitlement. Gans points out that Grateful Dead Productions was forced to lay off many employees last month including people that have been with the organization since its inception.
So I will go back to collecting Grateful Dead music the way we all used to, through trading. I still have my etree archive and I always enjoyed meeting new people and sharing the music. Perhaps this is a good thing, being forced to give a little instead of just take take take as we did with Archive.org. I will continue to use Archive.org to discover new music and listen to the remaining Grateful Dead streams. I will also continue to purchase downloads from the Grateful Dead store. I’d like to thank the folks at Archive.org for making it possible for me to listen to so much great live music from hundreds of bands. I regret that my first post about Archive.org contains such sad news, because I believe that Archive.org is a truly beautiful thing.
