Grateful Dead Concert Archive Headed to Play Dead Streaming Service

Deadheads can now stream around 300 concert recordings, including many hitting streaming services for the first time, via Play Dead, a subscription service on Nugs. The service partnered with Grateful Dead Productions and Rhino Entertainment for the endeavor, according to Billboard, and it will feature high-resolution audio for many beloved concerts. The collaboration, which launched with 20 previously unreleased vault recordings, will not impact or supersede the band’s physical releases via Rhino.

The idea has long been in the works, as the Grateful Dead initially partnered with Nugs’ founder and CEO Brad Serling in 2000 for a similar idea, Project Bandwagon, that didn’t get off the ground. Innovations in technology since then (y’know, high-speed streaming, iPhones, etc.) paved the way for a collaboration with Rhino and the Dead’s archivist, David Lemieux. They subsequently began digitizing multitrack tapes, reel-to-reels, and DAT tapes. “What we’re embarking on now is the largest tape transfer project in the history of rock & roll, as far as I know, at least for any single band,” Serling told Billboard.

The reason why it’s taken so long, Lemieux said, is quality control. As Billboard notes, there are around 2,300 unique Dead bootlegs floating around. What the Play Dead team did was to master them in a way that sounds better than cassettes that have been redubbed thousands of times. “This is not, ‘Let’s do quick transfers and spit them out,’” Lemieux said. The minimum resolution for audio on the site is 24 bits and 48kHZ, much better than that of a conventional CD.

Another Play Dead perk, the creators said, is curated selections by Lemieux, the ability to create playlists, and a user-friendly interface designed to make the Dead’s intimidating back catalogue navigable. Moreover, while Dead archival releases have typically been complete concerts, Play Dead will offer partial concerts.

“This is the closest you are getting to the piece of media that was in the room with the band, other than the band members onstage and whoever might still be alive from who was in the room,” Serling told Billboard. “This is the last living relic of what was in the room with the band on any given night, and we are making a high-res digital capture of that relic.”

The news follows the announcement of several celebrations of the Dead since the death of guitarist Bob Weir. John Mayer, who played lead opposite Weir in Dead & Company, launched a weekly listening party for Dead fans on Sirius XM. Meanwhile, actress Chloë Sevigny has begun production on a film about Deadheads.