Grateful Dead

dead.net the official site

All the music in the world, 90% of which I won't listen to, for 10 bucks a month sounds as good as that cable TV bill I was paying 15 bucks a month for in 1980. Was great at the time, but my cable bill is 10x the cost now, and keeps going up. Have fun with your streaming in 10 years. And besides, streaming and digital technology has killed the recording artists, and in turn, the concert scene. Piracy IS the reason the reason concert ticket sales are so high now. Artists have to make their money on the road, because there's little for them in songwriting royalties anymore. Technology killed the concert scene. What used to be a festive getaway for any who desired it is now reserved for the priveledged. And like wise Charlie said, the only CDs I buy is Limited Edition Dead CDs, and like wise KeithFan said, the fun part is opening the damn package and enjoying the artwork, the liner notes, and that great smell.

There's no turning back from it all, but make no mistake, we're being tethered and robbed in the long con. Enjoy your financial bondage.

First.. why only ten comments per page? You blink or take a day hike and you have scroll back 10 pages to get the pulse of what's going on.

Second.. 8-Tracks always sucked... well, they were ok for the first ten plays but on the 11th play your car or portable 8-Track player would get hungry and inevitably eat your tape. Then you realized you had to buy a really nice, expensive deck so it wouldn't eat your tapes.. you'd then get 37 listens before it got hungry and ate your tape and be out an extra $350 for a new high-end, but still shitty deck. If you were skilled.. you could somehow pull it out, bend and tuck all that extra tape back into the 8-Track cassette, but every time that part of the album came on it would sllllloooowwww dooowwwwnn where it was stretched.. then skip 10 seconds where you had to cut and splice it back together with scotch tape, etc. There is no comparing any media to 8-Tracks because they sucked that bad. As soon as my first tape was eaten, I loathed them and could not wait for a better technology. They were the first media you could play in a car, once another arrived they were gone like the dodo. Plus, album art or liner notes, forget about it. Comparing any of this to 8-tracks is like wondering why no one drives Edsels anymore.

As for streaming.. I find it just doesnt work well for dead music. I mean, what band has 2,318 albums? Amazon Alexa, for example, has a ton of concerts on their service.. but asking 'her' for one and having 'her' return and play the show you like is next to impossible. "Alexa, Play Grateful Dead Cornell University, 5/8/77" (which is in there) and you get "mmm I can't find that, here's Donnie and Marie Paper Roses 1977 instead", said in the most polite, androgynous voice possible.

Streaming just becomes difficult for a band with so many [albums] or shows, whatever. If it was quicker/easier to find exactly what I want, I would stream more. Perhaps tomorrow this will get better.

Who knows. I think for deadheads, who seem to have an almost unquenchable thirst for good music.. they will stream for the convenience and buy Dave's Picks and perhaps a box set a year, so why would Rhino walk away from that extra revenue stream of the new releases from the vault? In fact, their revenue is increasing, they are not going to pull the plug just yet. Streaming is for what has already been released and all the other music you listen to, but vault releases will likely continue to be released on physical media as a niche product. ..then in a few years it will wind up on the streaming platforms.

My two cents and I could be wrong.. I see GD listeners as being perhaps streamers and I'm going to get Dave's Picks too because I want it and it makes me happy and I want it now.

Oh.. and Charlie3, I totally get why you live where you live and it being worth the sacrafice of being plugged in all the time. An amazing part of the world.. beautiful and lots to do. Nothing wrong with cities, but you are in big sky country, I'd take it for 15 (slow) gigs a month or whatever the limit is and speed is. Perhaps 5G will change some of this.

So anyway.. this could be the year of the Ark. Makes sense, doesn't it. Bolo, bolo, bolo. There, said it three times.

There have been so many changes in format since I bought my first L.P in 1971. The move to cassettes, on to cds, on to digitally remastered cds-circa 1995, onto new digitally remastered cds this century using the latest technology. And now streaming. I am not sure what progress has been made, really. A lot of it seems, now-with the benefit of hindsight-to be a marketing ploy.
The move from having videos, onto dvds onto blu ray seems to me to have marked progress-but a lot of improvements to consumer items is surely designed to create profit-not to improve quality.

I too prefer hardcopy CD's. As far as I know Cd's cannot loose their data in the event of electro magnetic pulse event,
solar event etc.

I also preorder Dave's Picks Subscription every year for $99. Not try something stupid like try to cancel 1/2 my placed order. Just sell the extra at cost.

Just as an aside, my vote goes to VGuy for the slogan of the day with "You can lead a head to Winterland, but you can't lead him to his seat."

The answer to the recurrent question of "how could I have purchased a copy of this release before it sold out?" is to SUBSCRIBE. Don't chase each Dave's Pick, subscribe and trick them into showing up at your door.

I get what you are saying, and you may be right about the expense issue to some extent, but let me expand on a couple of my points.

My total data for the month through my internet provider is 15GB. For the month. I burn through that in two weeks just reading news and for work purposes. I would be seriously limited in my ability to stream or download music, let alone video, and would have to ration my listening time. That has no appeal. My phone service is also a plan with limited data, so that really doesn't change the picture. The data limitations alone mean that streaming is not really an option unless I jump up to a substantially more expensive data plan, and then pay for the streaming service on top of that. Your calculation assumes that there is no cost to data or internet access, but that is not the case for me. I would have the streaming cost, plus the cost of the additional data needed to make it worthwhile. I get this is an issue related to my geographic location, but I really like my geographic location with it's low population density and spectacular scenery. I have limited data access, but the one of the largest roadless area in the lower 48, the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, is just across the valley, with hiking trails in every just about every drainage up and down the Bitterroot Valley and an abundance of other nearby wilderness areas in just about every direction. I am getting by without the extra data.

As far as cost, most of what I buy at this point is limited edition dead releases, including Dave's Picks and the annual box set, that won't be available on a streaming service, so I will be stuck paying for that on disc whether or not I stream everything else. If I buy something on disc this month and go broke with unexpected expenses next month, I can listen to the music I already own without spending a dime, but with streaming I am committed to paying the monthly fee forever or I would not be able to listen to any of "my music". I would be paying for the same music month after month, most of which I already own on disc at this point. Which brings me to sunk costs. I already have a decent number of discs, since I haven't counted in a while I'll estimate about a few hundred, maybe close to a thousand. At this point I can listen to them without paying a dime, and since they represent the things that I am most likely to listen to, I would be paying to stream a lot of music that I already own on disc and can listen to for free. And to be honest, the whole streaming thing triggers some kind of atavistic luddite response for me, and I make no claim that this is necessarily a response that will seem logical to others.

Bottom line, if you dig streaming, go for it, the future looks bright for you. If you're one of those folks who dig vinyl, good timing, it seems to have made a comeback. For me, I foresee CD's being the source of my music for the foreseeable future.

I have no use for it.
Proud to be that guy.
:O)

....you had both right there! Sell one! Jeezus.....you can lead a head to Winterland, but you can't lead him to his seat.

I would love to experience Dave's Picks 30, but unfortunately, due to a ridiculous purchase process, I lost out. Won't go into gory details, but I got no help trying to deal with a problem (mistakenly ordered two cd's and tried to cancel one). Supposedly couldn't delete one unless I emailed a request. I did not get a response until 5 days later, and now the cd is sold out.

Because of this, and the fact that there is such a ridiculously low number of cd's released, making it virtually impossible to purchase a cd, I will not purchase anything from Deadnet again.

....yeah. About that. Been in our current house for three years. I love it, but that was one complaint I had about it. Mrs. Vguy trumped me. Now where's my sledgehammer? (a wall. Not my wife).
....streaming. I'm slowly accepting it. What choice do I have? Buffering sucks major ass. An exercise in futility. 😡 I dread being that guy who has a laptop/tablet in every room. Ptth.
❤️ Spotify....I'm not an audiophile, so it works just fine for me.