the country, and the stock market, became obsessed with Internet technology, the pace picked up, and the breadth and speed of Internet delivery accelerated. In a 1994 issue of early cyber-culture magazine Mondo 2000, avant-garde musician Kenneth Newby interviewed Lord and Patterson and described IUMA as a “kind of digital club where the bands play for free, there’s no cover charge, and the owners are just happy that you came.”
This kind of description echoed popular expectations of the Web in general, raising a question that would haunt nearly everyone who had some creative, digitized product that they hoped to sell on the Web: How did the Internet develop into a giant playground where everyone expected things to be free? Once a piece of work was digitized, Web users seemed to instinctively feel that it was fair game for anyone who wanted to download it.
The recording industry seemed unconcerned with IUMA, and if it noticed at all, it was to take advantage of IUMA’s service, on a very small scale. The small, progressive, Warner-affiliated label 4AD Records, for example, had Web pages created for its bands. Other than that, music industry insiders simply made a note to have a talk with IUMA’s founders, to affirm that they were all interested in doing cool stuff.
As Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig has put it, the code from which the Net is built is the law. Many of the expectations about online music are the legacy of builders themselves, and many beliefs are based on the structure of the networks. Those who built the Web, though a very diverse bunch, tended to share many similar goals. The Internet, of course, arose from the bowels of the Cold War infrastructure of military and education. It was a way of distributing research and military data using computer networks that spurted “packets” of information across multiple lines to be later reassembled into their original form at the final destination. The system, as developed at the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), promised a quick, if somewhat quirky method of communication that included not only the sharing of programs and data over great distance, but also radio messaging that would not break down due to jamming or geography.
For a research-oriented group, the ability to share data from around the country and around the world was the main interest. The likelihood of commercial rights holders asserting their claims was not much of a concern; in fact all commercial activity was officially off-limits on the Net until 1991. Commercial interest wasn’t great anyway until the World Wide Web transformed the rather arcane communication tools of the Net into lively multimedia portals, ready to open on command on the screens of the workforce, student body, and swelling ranks of home users who were just getting comfortable with their PCs.
Many of those involved in the creation of the Web had lofty, socially ambitious goals that involved making it as easy as possible to share information, and many expected to foster a leap in human knowledge and culture that could usher in another Renaissance. “The Web,” Tim Berners-Lee wrote, “was designed as an instrument to prevent misunderstandings.” The system that he designed encouraged the free spread of what would later be called “content,” and he was not alone in feeling inspired by beliefs that were strongly optimistic, even verging on utopian.
“The whole spread of the Web happened not because of a decision and a mandate from any specific authority, but because a whole bunch of people across the ’Net picked it up and brought up Web clients and servers,” Berners-Lee wrote in an essay about the overlapping goals of the Web and Unitarian religion. “The actual explosion of creativity, and the coming into being of the Web was the result of thousands of individuals playing a small part. In the first couple of years, often this was not for a direct financial gain, but because they had an inkling that it was the right way to go, and a gleam of an exciting future.”
The Web was at first slow and buggy, especially for home users, but the excitement of a multimedia network was catchy, and what can only be described as a mass migration of work and culture online began. Because the impact of the Web was so profound and widespread, many metaphors were tossed around in an attempt to describe and assess its impact. Comparisons to Gutenberg’s development of the printing press, highways, and casbahs all reflected the particular viewpoints of the describers, most of whom were in awe of the potential. After all, a lot had been done with tools as simple as e-mail, mailing lists, and bulletin boards. It was just those kinds of tools, together with the tape recorder, that had been the secret behind the success of the Grateful Dead.
The first online mailing list ever dedicated to a single group (originating at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab) was dedicated to the Dead. “It was appropriate that it was about the Grateful Dead,” explained Steve Silberman, probably the most articulate expert on the band, “because the Grateful Dead was one of the first groups to develop a truly mobile community of fans, who would follow the band from venue to venue on every tour. The way that the Dead played music was inextricably related to the fact that they developed a mobile community of fans.”
Silberman believed that the experiences of the band and its fans carry insight about the nature of musical communities when they meet the power of electronic networking. The Grateful Dead changed their set lists every night, and they changed the way they played each song every night. That modus operandi inspired Stanley Owsley, an LSD chemist and visionary sound engineer, to suggest to the band, sometime around 1968, that they should record every show to amass a vault of recordings.
As the band began recording live performances, fans followed suit with their own recordings. The Dead gave a free concert on Haight Street in San Francisco in 1968, and a reel-to-reel tape of that show was recorded by one Steve Brown. That tape ended up being copied and passed around by soldiers in Vietnam, after Brown took it with him when he went over for a tour of duty. It became a “coveted” item among the Deadheads who were fighting, said Silberman, who has written an encyclopedia on The Dead, Skeleton Key.
As the network of traders grew, they initially relied on exchanging business cards at shows to stay in touch. Then, as the personal computer surged in popularity, Deadheads were among the largest cultural groups of early adopters, mostly due to the incredible usefulness of bulletin board systems or BBSs, dial-in computer networks that not only let you trade gossip and tapes, but also let you make friends with—and stay in daily contact with—members of the Dead inner circle. At the top of the BBS list was famed California electronic community the WELL, started by Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog publisher and Merry Prankster. Being on the WELL gave you a huge logistical advantage if you were a Deadhead in the late ’80s and early ’90s, said Silberman, because it allowed privileged access to those who could secure coveted tickets and make early announcements about tour dates. The WELL also offered Internet access, so that fans could use some online repositories that had begun to sprout up.
“Even before MP3s became big there were people who were creating FTP directories with everything from digitized photos and art, to set lists, to the entire career of the band in electronic form, complete with electronic documents,” Silberman explained. “Now there are these very deep directories that are passed secretly by e-mail, where 500 Dead shows have been digitized, either song by song or set by set.” The addresses to these treasure troves are closely guarded, for fear of being swamped by downloaders and overloading the servers.
“The interesting thing about Garcia saying ‘When we’re through with [the music], it’s theirs’ was that it created this model for building the value of intellectual property by giving it away,” Silberman said.
By letting fans do whatever they wanted with taped concert music, the Dead made their music more valuable because people wanted more of it, and furthermore, they wanted to be there when that magic was being made: “The tapes cast an event quality over what would otherwise be perceived as just another show. Each tape was as good as an album, so it was like being invited to hear a new album being created 150 nights a year. What really created the Deadhead community was the ability to trade tapes, and once the online world came around, it was the perfect way to do it.”
Flash forward to the late ’90s and things were not looking so rosy for the Dead. After Jerry Garcia died (and became one of the first celebrities to receive a spontaneous wave of scores of personal and private Web pages offered in memorial), the band’s income was sharply