Tapers are a different breed of music fan. They show up
at concerts with a suitcase and claim their spot, usually FOH (Front of House).
Up goes a microphone with a tiny umbrella. The Taper section looks like Area
51. Tapers are the first to arrive, and the last to leave and they're
passionate about sound, particular about their recording equipment. Today it's digital, but back in the day it
was Maxell Vs. TDK. Cassettes vs. DAT. Taper philosophy and etiquette was never
to charge for copies (covering postage is acceptable); profiting from the
recordings was and is strictly taboo. The practice of allowing taping and
utilizing the tapers as a promotional strategy is known in the business world as Inbound
Marketing, with companies like Dell and Pepsi only now catching on.
And it all goes back to The Dead in 1967. So how did a
group of musicians from San Francisco transform marketing and become social
media pioneers? Essentially, The Dead made a series of important choices to
separate themselves from everyone in their industry, making difficult and
unpopular decisions along the way, such as allowing fans to tape concerts or
creating special tickets and access for fans.
The concept of the freemium
model is to give away valuable information to attract a larger base of prospective
customers with a percentage of them willing to pay for a premium product or
service. This approach is at the core of inbound marketing and
describes the evolving marketing funnel for many businesses today. It’s a
bastardization of the Dead ideal, but remains a pretty sophisticated approach
from a collection of misfits and miscreants.
The Dead, one of the most iconic and successful rock bands of its era, achieved
elite success with only one top 10 song (which didn't come until we got our MTV). Instead, they succeeded by building a
word-of-mouth network of fans powered by free music.
The Dead understood that it was about the experience that the music provided,
which in itself served as a role model for living a creative life. The Dead model was so successful, it’s taught in business
schools and codified in books like Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead.
Those internal, seemingly instinctual tenets of business
created a multi-million-dollar industry without industry in mind. According to
the Dead Model: 1) The most important thing is playing and creating. Everything
else is secondary. 2) Work is a family affair. It’s important to shelter,
support and share with a larger community. 3) Money plays second fiddle to
living the kind of life one wants to live. According to Jerry, “You can build
your own economy.” 4) Accept the hazards and finger-pointing as a small hindrance
of living differently. 5) Push the envelope whenever possible. 6) Build a
scene. These beliefs added up to a worldview that aligned with the values of
the hippies and flower children of the ‘60s who intended to reshape the country
and the world in their image. Pretty powerful stuff. It certainly didn’t hurt
that the world was ready to think differently the moment the Dead first
administered the acid test.
The Grateful Dead pioneered community-building in a lot
of ways but mostly by thinking of their fans as part of the band, not separate
from it. The Dead’s fans wanted to record each show, so the band let them by
creating special “taper’s sections” in the audience. They encouraged
peer-to-peer tape exchange by their fans, which attracted an even larger base
of paying attendees, essentially pioneering the “freemium” content model.
Everything the Dead did was to assure that the band lived
the life they wanted to lead, making them beholden only to their creativity and
fans — not a bad template for the rest of us.