Jeremy Kashnow
Tie-Dyes, Birkenstocks, and DAT decks: The impact of Digital Audio Tape on the Grateful Dead community
“Grateful Dead
– The motif of a cycle of folk tales which begins with the hero’s coming upon a
group of people ill-treating or refusing to bury the corpse of a man who had
died without paying his debts. He gives
his last penny, either to pay the man’s debts or to give him decent
burial. Within a few hours he meets with
a traveling companion who aids him in some impossible task, gets him a fortune,
saves his life, etc. The story ends with
the companion’s disclosing himself as the man whose corpse the other had
befriended.”
– Funk and
Wagnall’s New Practical Standard Dictionary of the English Language, Vol. 1,
1955
Introduction
Digital Audio Tape was introduced by Sony in 1987 and was hailed as a revolutionary new recording format, free from the many technical limitations of traditional analog tape. Despite obvious technical advantages, the technology failed to succeed as a mainstream consumer medium and was eventually discontinued as a consumer format in the late 1990s. Among one group of consumers, however, the technology was widely adopted and continues to be the format of choice for recording live musical events. This community is a subgroup of Americans known as Deadheads, or fans of the rock group The Grateful Dead. In this analysis I will examine the factors that led to the successful adoption of this technology, the impact it had on the Grateful Dead community and the longer-term impact on other relevant social groups.
The main factors that led to this success were:
- the technological frame of the community,
- the unique technical benefits of this new medium for this social group, and
- the inherent social and economic incentives to both Deadheads and the Grateful Dead Organization.
In order to understand the impact that Digital Audio Tape had on this community, it is necessary to understand not only the evolution of the development of digital audio equipment, but also the evolution of the relationship between “tapers” and the Grateful Dead Organization. This history will provide an appropriate frame of context in which to effectively analyze the unique factors that led to the successful adoption of this reasonably obscure technology.
Development of Digital Audio Equipment
Analog vs. digital.
The most significant development in consumer audio technology in recent years has been the shift from analog to digital recording techniques. Digital recordings are free from the mechanical “hiss” present in analog tape recordings. This “hiss” is amplified whenever a copy is made of the analog tape. Each subsequent “generation” (copy) is of decreasing fidelity. This is known as “generational degradation.” Because digital copies are exact clones of the originals, they do not suffer from this generational loss in quality.
Furthermore, digital tapes provide a wider frequency response than analog tapes. This translates into a more accurate representation of the original audio signal than analog cassette tapes can produce.
Copy Protection - SCMS
Serial Copy Management Systems or SCMS was the recording industry’s caveat for allowing the development of Digital Audio tape. “The first DAT deck didn't make it possible to copy digitally, but in 1989 the anti-copy process called SCMS was integrated on non-professional DAT decks and allows one digital generation copy. Later copies must be done from the analog outputs.”[1] This mechanism prohibited the digital copying of copies. Master tapes may be copied once, but copies of copies cannot be made. The goal of this system was to prevent the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted material.
The Deadhead taper response to SCMS was to develop circuitry to effectively strip the SCMS codes from tapes. This circuitry, while effective, was expensive and added greatly to the already high cost of DAT equipment (~$1000). The other alternative to tapers was to purchase professional DAT equipment that did not implement the SCMS technology.
The Flip
“The flip” is the process of ejecting a cassette, and flipping it from side A to side B. A typical analog cassette can hold 45 minutes of music on each side of the tape. The first set of a Grateful Dead concert is usually around 50 to 90 minutes. This makes it necessary to flip the tape during the set of music. The first set of a Dead show is made up of seven to ten discrete songs with a (sometimes significant) tuning break between songs. These breaks allow tapers the time to make “the flip” without missing any music. The second set, however, is usually more improvisational and jazz-influenced in nature. Usually lasting about 90 minutes, this poses a challenge for analog tapers.
DAT tapes come in lengths of up to 180 minutes. This extended format allows an entire concert to be recorded on one tape. This increase in length is a significant technical benefit to the taping community. A “bad flip,” or a flip made during the middle of a song, can be the source of endless apologies whenever trading a tape containing such a “faux pas.”
Grateful Dead and Taping
Wolfes and Bears
As chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s historical masterpiece, “The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,”[2]
the Dead began their career as the house band for Ken Kesey and the Merry
Pranksers’ legendary Acid Tests. The
Merry Pranksters were a circle of literary misfits, the nucleus of which was
the novelist Ken Kesey. Born out of the
cauldron of bohemian renaissance and anarchistic revolution that characterized
the 1960s in
Their infatuation with acoustic excellence can be traced back to their relationship with Augustus Owsley Stanley III, affectionately known as “The Bear.” Owsley was part chemist, part alchemist, and the ultimate technological hobbyist. Joining the Grateful Dead as a sound engineer in the mid-1960s, Owsley used the Dead as a vehicle for his quest for sonic perfection. Exerting control by funding the Grateful Dead organization (with money made from licit and illicit LSD-sales), Owsley was able to convince the band to embark on a well intentioned, yet conventionally unrealistic endeavor to build the best sounding public address system ever conceived. This complex system was aptly named, “The Wall of Sound.”
“The Wall” consisted of 641 speakers drawing 26,000-watts of power and standing three stories tall. “The concept was one of radical simplicity: one enormous stack of speakers for each instrument and each microphone, all set up right behind the musicians. No stage monitors, no mixer.”[4] The focus was on fidelity, not volume, and the result was phenomenal. The price for sonic excellence was high, however. “The Wall of Sound was extraordinarily cumbersome to haul around, filling five trailer trucks. Because it was so time-consuming to load in and assemble, it was necessary to build two of them – with one always leapfrogging ahead to the next gig (with an extra crew).”[5]
Pushed to the point of physical and financial exhaustion by touring with such an ensemble, the band decided to halt touring in 1975. The hiatus lasted only a year and the band returned in 1976 without “The Wall of Sound.” Owsley’s penchant for sonic purity had nevertheless been etched upon the psyche of the band and their fans for decades to come. As discussed below, it was this influence that helped define the technological frame[6] with which the Dead and Deadheads approached any acoustic endeavor henceforth.
Official Taping Section
Dan Healy was the sound engineer for the Dead from 1966 through 1994. Annoyed by the obstruction of his view of the stage created by microphone stands in front of the soundboard, and bowing to taper demand, Healy created the first official taping section at the Berkeley Community Theater in October of 1984.
This marked an official acceptance and even promotion of the recording of Grateful Dead concerts. The Dead subsequently formalized their taping policy:
TAPING AT ALL SHOWS IS ONLY AUTHORIZED IN
SPECIFIC TAPER SECTIONS.
Taping is a privilege. Not a right.
Reserved
seating shows: You will need a reserved seat taper ticket. Taping gear can only
be brought in with a specific taper ticket, which can only be obtained through
GDTSTOO. Max is 2 tickets per show per person.
GA
shows; mixed venues with both reserved seating and GA, or venues with a lawn:
The taper section will always be in the general admission part of a venue, or
on the lawn. No specific taper ticket will be needed. Taping gear cannot be
brought in with a reserved seat ticket.
Wherever
possible a special door will be available for taper entrance. If you arrive
without the proper ticket for taping, you will be given the choice of bringing
your gear back to your car or forfeit the show. If tapers are sighted in the
venue setting up outside the taping area they will again be given this same
choice.[7]
Humorously, “from ’84 to ’86, the taper tickets were stamped with a portrait of ‘the King of Tapers” – Richard Nixon”[8]
This policy was in place for 11 years until the breakup of the Grateful Dead following the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995. This policy was so successful that it was recently reiterated as the policy for taping “The Other Ones” – the band formed by remaining members of The Grateful Dead – for the upcoming Fall tour.
Bettyboards
In the absence of an official taping section, high-quality tapes of Grateful Dead concerts were often difficult to find. This changed in 1985 when the “bettyboards” were found.
“Bettyboards - A cache of 250 hours or so of soundboard master tapes of the Dead, Kingfish, and New Riders of the Purple Sage, Hot Tuna, and various Garcia bands – on large and small reels and cassettes – recorded by sound engineer Betty Cantor-Jackson, and kept in a storage locker until 1985, when the contents of the locker came up for auction due to delinquent storage fees. A small group of tape collectors and associates made the winning bid for the contents, copied the tapes, and distributed them to traders.
Such an enormous volume of highest-quality tapes caused a
mass upgrade of trading standards. ‘It
was like opening up a garage and finding a ’71 Corvette that had never been
driven,’ explains taper Ihor Slabicky.
Many of the shows had not been previously available as soundboards, and
shows like the
Most of the bettyboards have been transferred to DAT and
have been circulated through most taping circles. Due in part to the extremely high-quality of
the recordings, many shows have taken on legendary status among Deadheads. It has often been said that if you don’t like
Barton Hall,
Paradigm Shift – Primary revenue from live concerts rather than record sales
The Grateful Dead pioneered a new economic model for musicians. “As they had in different ways over the years, the Dead confounded the conventional wisdom of the music business by growing wildly more popular despite the band’s seeming indifference to the tried-and-true success formula of regularly releasing commercially viable records, and touring to promote those records. The Dead’s studio output was sporadic – seven years elapsed between Go To Heaven and In The Dark – and sales figures were far from spectacular. There was a gold record here and there in a multi-platinum world, but the band didn’t have a real hit until 1987’s Touch of Grey. Even during their long recording droughts, they managed to sell more concert tickets than any band on Earth. The grapevine flourished, as word-of-mouth about the Dead’s live shows, aided by the abundant availability of homemade tapes, made the band the top-grossing concert act in the country, and one of the most popular live attractions of all time.”[10] This shift from a revenue stream based on the sale of studio recordings to revenue generation from live concert events made the Grateful Dead one of the few rock groups to sustain success over more than three decades.
Definition of Relevant Social Groups
Pinch and Bijker discuss the concept of relevant social groups as part of their analysis of the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) model[11] developed in the 1980s. They define relevant social groups as people who play a role in the development of a technological artifact and share a meaning of the artifact. It is important to note that different social groups may associate different meanings with the artifact, thus the same artifact can mean different things to different social groups of users. This concept is known as “interpretive flexibility”[12] and is exhibited in the differing views on Digital Audio Tape by those within the Grateful Dead community and those in the traditional recording industry.
The relevant social groups I will examine include Tapers, Deadheads, The Grateful Dead Organization, Security Personnel, Media Executives, and Bootleggers.
Tapers
Tapers are people who make audio recordings of Grateful Dead concerts. They are historians and archivists and consider themselves the public servants of the greater Grateful Dead community. An odd subset of Deadheads, they tend to be more technical, less social, and exhibit clear signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder. This obsessive behavior, while probably detrimental to the mental health of the tapers themselves, is of overwhelming benefit to the overall Deadhead community. Tapers are often judged, and often judge themselves, by the quality of their tapes and this pressure leads to the quest for perfect recordings. The introduction of DAT tape has had extreme effects on this social group.
The right to record live musical events is seen as a moral imperative by many tapers. This moral domain of social knowledge is defined by Friedman as prescriptive judgments which people justify based on considerations of justice, fairness, right, or human welfare.[13] With this view in mind, tapers feel that they are the agents of justice who will spread the music to the masses. This moral framework was in place even before the Grateful Dead Organization officially allowed the recording of their live events in 1984.
Shared Language
Tapers further establish themselves as a social entity by the development of a shared language. The following are some examples of the Deadhead Taping language:
- Mercy Killing – “Stealth taper ethics: when the taper gets “nailed” by security guards who demand the tape, and the taper destroys the tape to prevent it from falling into the hands of local bootleggers.”[14]
- SBDs, AUDs, and FMs – “SBDs are tapes made directly from the Dead’s soundboard, AUDs are audience tapes made by Deadheads using microphones, and FMs are recordings taped over the radio.”[15]
- Crispy – “Said admiringly of ultra-‘clean’ tapes, usually soundboards, with no hiss, no saturation, no distortion, or other unwanted noise. ‘Those Veneta bettyboards are so crisp!’”[16]
Deadheads
A Deadhead, as defined by Shenk and Silberman, is “someone who loves – and draws meaning from – the music of the Grateful Dead and the experience of Dead shows, and builds community with others who feel the same way.”[17]
All deadheads, not simply tapers, have benefited directly from the adoption of DAT. Due to the lack of generational degradation, the Deadheads benefited even more from the introduction of DAT than the tapers themselves. Tapers have always had access to high-fidelity recordings, although DAT taping definitely raised the overall quality. It is the Deadhead masses that have had a varying degree of tape quality depending on their generational distance from the master recordings. DAT taping effectively eliminated this disparity and allowed all Deadheads access to extremely high-quality recordings of shows. Even if most Deadheads had never used a DAT deck, they were often nevertheless benefactors of this technology, as they most likely owned low-generation analog copies of digital tapes.
The Grateful Dead Organization
The Grateful Dead Organization is defined as the band itself, as well as the extensive support organization developed around it. This social group also had to adapt to the new environment created by the introduction of DAT technology. The result of this technological development was the creation of new policies and procedures for taping to accommodate the new medium. They chose to embrace this change; however they discontinued the practice of allowing tapers to patch directly into the soundboard. The theory was that a digital recording from the soundboard would be of such high quality, bootleggers would be able to produce and sell CDs more easily. Some bands have chosen to prohibit all digital recordings of their shows under these same auspices.
Orlikowski discusses the concept of “incentives” as mechanisms to support organizational change[18]. Because the economic model of the Grateful Dead organization was based primarily on people attending live concert events rather than simply purchasing studio recordings, there was an incentive for the Grateful Dead Organization to actively promote recording and trading of recordings of their live events. Because the audio tapes accurately captured a portion of the Grateful Dead experience allowing others to experience it, and because the significance of these events stood on their own merit, the tapes acted as an organic marketing tool for the band. People who listened to performances on tape were more likely to attend concerts when the Grateful Dead came to a town near them. This shift on emphasis from record sales to concert ticket sales provided an economic incentive for the Grateful Dead Organization to actively embrace taping. As the benefits of digital taping (primarily the lack of generational degradation) on the entire Grateful Dead community became apparent, there was an incentive for the organization to develop new policies and procedures to allow and even encourage digital recording.
The one caveat was that taping could not be engaged in for financial gain:
Dear Dead Heads,
We have a simple taping policy.
It's okay with us to tape live
Grateful Dead performances and trade them freely,
so long as no money changes hands.
You send 'em a blank, they make you a tape,
and vise-versa.
As soon as money enters in on any level,
it's a commercial transaction; and with our music,
decisions on commerce are ours and ours alone.
Thank you,
Grateful Dead[19]
Security Personnel
Security personnel at venues were also affected by the development of DAT equipment. The DAT recording devices tended to be smaller and more easily hidden than their analog brethren. This made the job of security personnel more difficult which affected all Deadheads as security checkpoints began to take longer to cross. Security staff had to be trained to search for new devices. This became increasingly difficult as tapers became security-savvy. Often groups of tapers would distribute recording equipment amongst many people so that the pieces were more difficult to find. It was not uncommon for tapers to go to extreme lengths to get their decks in. “One couple would bake a ‘D-5 cake’ each New Year’s Eve – a hollowed-out sheet cake with the compact Sony deck inside and frosted with ‘Happy New Year!’”[20]
As venue size increased with the popularity of the Dead, the number of security personnel needed to work a given concert increased proportionally. During the early 1990s there was a trend towards corporate ownership of large venues. The companies that purchased these venues were usually entertainment conglomerates having interests in the recording industry as well as live concert promotion. This shift from community-based venues to corporate-owned venues can be seen with the purchase of Bill Graham Presents, a small San Francisco-based promotion company, by media conglomerate Clear-Channel. With corporations hiring and training security personnel, these two social groups tended to share a common meaning of this artifact and viewed DAT equipment as contraband.
Media Executives
The view of DAT equipment that media executives held clearly demonstrates Pinch and Bijker’s concept of interpretive flexibility[21]. This relevant social group associates a very different meaning with this artifact than Deadheads, Tapers, and the Grateful Dead Organization. What is viewed as an extremely beneficial technological development to these aforementioned groups is seen as the embodiment of the collapse of the latter group’s existing power structure. There are direct economic incentives for media executives to actively prohibit both the legal and illegal use of DAT equipment.
Prohibition of legal use
The Grateful Dead explicitly allow digital taping of their events. They also explicitly allow the trading of these tapes in a non-commercial setting. It follows that the recording and trading of these tapes is not an illegal act. It has been argued, however, by media executives, that these acts negatively affect the studio recording purchasing patterns of Deadheads. If record sales decrease, but concert ticket sales increase, the Grateful Dead organization continues to profit. This is not true for media executives, as they have been essentially disintermediated. It is this decline in record sales that provides media organizations with an incentive to limit even the legal use of DAT equipment.
There is considerable conventional social knowledge[22] to support the axiom that digital taping cannot be prohibited. Dennis McNally, publicist for the Grateful Dead, has said, “short of erasing tapes by putting electromagnets over every exit, taping can’t be prevented.”[23] This fact, coupled with the increasing popularity of all live concert events, has prompted media organizations to find ways to benefit economically from the live concert revenue stream. They have accomplished this goal by purchasing venues, ticketing organizations, and promotion companies. The revenue from live events, however, is still minimal in comparison to record sales. This disparity is due to the relatively low volume of ticket sales in relation to album sales, and the fact that media organizations have not been able to effectively establish their financial domination of the concert industry the way they have in the recoding industry. This is likely due to the relative infancy in their life cycle of involvement with live events in contrast to their decades of involvement with the distribution of recorded media. If past performance is any indication of future behavior, it is likely that media organizations will slowly begin to dominate the concert industry.
Prohibition of illegal use
The use of DAT equipment for illegal recording has a more obvious impact on the revenue of media organizations. This is due in part to diminished sales caused by the taping of live events, but more largely due to the illegal recording and distribution of copyrighted material. The copyright infringement issues that are beginning to develop are plaguing all aspects of digital media production, not just digital audio. These infringement issues lead media executives to view all digital recording as bootlegging, regardless of the specific legalities involved. The field of copyright law in the digital frontier continues to evolve.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1984 in favor of Sony Corporation
of
Bootleggers
There exists an exogenous view of DAT equipment that values reside with the users, not the technology. While Friedman postulates that “human activity is constrained and perhaps even prodded by features of technology, but not determined by it.”[26], it is important to understand that users with mal intent are still enabled by this technology to conduct illegal acts. One such group is bootleggers, or those who record shows and sell them for profit. Bootleggers share yet another meaning of this artifact. They view DAT decks as revenue generating tools. In effect, according to Friedman’s exogenous view of technology[27], digital recording devices don’t make and sell illegal recordings of concerts, people do.
Planned Effects
The planned effect of the introduction of Digital Audio Tape was primarily that consumer audio enthusiasts would now have a digital recording medium to work with. With the introduction of portable DAT decks, Deadhead tapers would now have the necessary equipment with which to produce high-quality field recordings that embodied all of the benefits of a digital recording medium. CDs had become the most quickly adopted consumer technology ever developed. The advent of Digital Audio Tape was supposed to bring digital recording ability to the masses of people who had become familiar with the high fidelity of digital recordings through their use of CDs.
Technological Frame
As defined by Pinch and Bijker in their Social Construction of Technology framework, “A technological frame structures the interactions between the actors of a relevant social group.”[28] Orlikowski states “when confronted with a new technology, individuals try to understand it in terms of their existing technological frames, often augmenting these frames to accommodate special aspects of the technology. If the technology is sufficiently different, however, these existing frames may be inappropriate, and individuals will need to significantly modify their technological frames in order to understand or interact effectively with the new technology.”[29] The introduction of Digital Audio Tape was difficult for people to comprehend because it embodied properties of both compact discs and analog tape. While physically resembling an analog tape, the underlying digital technology was more similar to compact discs. The fact that this technology was based on linear tape was of extreme hindrance to the rate of acceptance. Most people associated the word “tape” with an inferior audio format, although by definition, DAT reproduces a higher fidelity sound than even a CD, let alone an analog tape. (Compact discs store music at a sampling rate of 44.1 KHz while DAT tapes can store information at the higher rate of 48 KHz. This increase in sampling rate translates directly to a wider frequency response in the recording, and thus a subjectively “better” sounding recording.)
“How users change their technological frames in response to a new technology is influenced by (1) the kind and amount of information about the product communicated to them, and (2) the nature and form of training they receive on the product.”[30] The general consumer audio community is a loose-knit group of people with often little or even no common ties. The information they receive is often via mass media channels and they receive no formal training in new audio formats. The lack of effective communication led mainstream audio consumers to understand DAT in terms of their existing technological frames. Due to the physical appearance, the analog tape was most often inappropriately used as a model for understanding DAT tape. Since the recent widespread adoption of CDs, this move towards a tape-based format was seen by the misinformed as a technological step backwards.
The tight community that Deadheads and especially Deadhead tapers have developed has led to an increase in communication regarding technological developments. Tapers tend to be well educated in the realm of audio engineering and tend to discuss taping-related issues within their community. This was especially true once the Deadhead community embraced virtual communities as communication tools.
Virtual Communities
Deadheads have always been early adopters of technology and this trait was demonstrated by their relationship with digital communication tools. In the early days of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (The WELL), Stewart Brand’s on-line community of literary scholars, intellectuals, and journalists, the Deadhead community made up the majority of subscribers.[31]
This forum allowed tapers to discuss the latest technological developments in audio equipment and allowed experts to dispel various myths that were propagating. The dissemination of high-quality information about new formats and the willingness of veteran tapers to teach newer tapers how to use this equipment provided the community with an appropriate technological frame with which to understand DAT equipment.
Deadhead Publications
It would be misleading to portray all Deadheads or even all Deadhead tapers as computer-savvy techies. Many tapers were not familiar with on-line communities at all until the Internet became the mass-marketed tool it is today. In the absence of these forums, Deadheads turned to more traditional communication channels. The most effective of these was Relix magazine.
“Relix was born in 1974 as Dead Relix, edited by pioneer tapers Les Kippel and Jerry Moore. The grassroots aesthetics of Relix came out of the early tape-trading underground courtesy of Moore and Kippel, who recorded his second show at the Fillmore East in July ’70 with a one-dollar microphone... ‘It got to the point where I had thirteen tape machines running at one time in my house, so we started a magazine that featured articles on equipment, how to smuggle recorders into shows, and lists of good and bad traders.’”[32]
Publications such as this helped foster an appropriate technological frame with which to understand new technological developments and ultimately increased the adoption rate of DAT equipment by Deadhead tapers.
Unintended Consequences
As with the introduction of any new technology, in addition to the planned outcomes, there were a number of developments that would have been difficult, if not impossible to predict.
Deadheads adopt DAT
One unintended consequence of the introduction of DAT as a consumer format was the use of DAT equipment by Deadheads. This technology was designed for home audio “consumers” and professional “producers” of entertainment. The Deadheads fall into a niche somewhere between these poles. While not actually creating the music that they capture on the tapes, the Deadheads create the tapes themselves from a live musical source. This type of behavior was expected from professionals but not necessarily consumers. Furthermore, it was not expected that people would be using consumer DAT equipment to record events that did not fall under the conventional copyright laws. This can be seen by the presence of the SCMS copy protection mechanism on consumer equipment.
Bias against Deadheads
This technology enforces copyright laws in indiscriminate ways. Regardless of whether or not the material being recorded falls under the legal definition of copyrighted material, the technology assumes that the recording should not be copied and applies the SCMS code to prevent digital reproduction. It is useful to look at Friedman’s bias framework[33] when attempting to understand whether or not there is bias against Deadheads built into the DAT equipment.
“The term bias refers to [computer] systems that systematically and unfairly discriminate against certain individuals or groups of individuals in favor of others.”[34] Furthermore, “unfair discrimination alone does not give rise to bias unless it occurs systematically, and systematic discrimination does not establish bias unless it is joined with an unfair outcome.”[35] It is clear that DAT equipment systematically favors home audio consumers, and not people making field recordings of non-copyrighted material. This systematic discrimination unfairly prohibits Deadheads from using DAT equipment to legally reproduce non-copyrighted material.
Friedman describes three categories of bias[36] - preexisting, technical, and emergent - that provide context for the analysis of bias against Deadheads.
Preexisting
Preexisting bias has roots in social institutions, practices, and attitudes. This type of bias is apparent in the implementation of the DAT technology’s SCMS. Existing social structures have conspired to implement a technical limitation to prohibit the full use of DAT equipment in certain contexts.
Technical
Technical bias arises from technical constraints or limitations. In the case of DAT equipment, there is no inherent technical limitation to prohibit digital reproduction. In fact, the ability to produce “non-lossy” reproductions of tapes is one of the main benefits of the technology. The use of SCMS has created an artificial technical constraint that is actually based in the preexisting social structure, and not the technology itself.
Emergent
Emergent bias arises in a context of use. While it is clear that the bias against Deadheads using DAT equipment is borne in the underlying social structure of media organizations, it is not clear that there was actual intent to prohibit Deadhead use. Due to the fact that Deadhead use of DAT equipment was an unplanned consequence of the introduction of DAT, the bias is actually emergent in nature, resulting from a shift in the context of use by a new social group.
Increasing popularity of the Dead
The most significant unintended consequence of the introduction of Digital Audio Taping was an increase in popularity of the band. While a direct link would be difficult to substantiate, the band and its crew have observed it informally, and it has become a widely accepted theory.[37]
Deadheads as ‘Net Heads
As discussed above, virtual communities became an early forum for Grateful Dead discussion. While these forums gave existing net-savvy Deadheads a place to discuss taping issues, the need for this type of discourse also enticed non-virtual community members to purchase computers and modems to join in the discussions. There developed a unique symbiotic relationship between the taping community and the Internet. Once critical mass has been established, the value of a taping network increases directly as the network grows. The Internet provided geographically dispersed tapers a way to coordinating the trading of tapes. The early virtual communities needed participants to make the systems commercially viable and Deadheads needed a way to effectively communicate with each other to trade tapes.
Societal Impact
The introduction of DAT has had significant effects on both the society of Grateful Dead fans, and the Entertainment industry as a whole.
Democratization of taping within Grateful Dead society
“DAT technology all but eliminates hiss, by recording a stream of on-off pulses rather than an electronic facsimile of the sound waves. For tape traders, this introduces the radical notion that a high-generation tape – a ‘hi-gen,’ the previously undesirable copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy – will be essentially the same tape as the first dub off the master. Consequently, some of the politics of tape trading – networking for closer access to the source tapes – is made more democratic, with social hierarchies mattering less, and the development of efficient means of dissemination more or less equal quality tapes mattering more.”[38]
Digital recording is truly a democratizing technology as it has broken down the old “power” structure of tapers and their close friends. Because of generational degradation, the quality of person’s tape collection used to be directly related to the closeness of their relationship with a taper. This is no longer the case as a first generation copy of a master tape, and a 100th generation copy are both exact clones of the original. The remaining critical issue is time. The distance a tape trader is from the master tape will affect the time involved in obtaining a copy of a particular show, but not the quality.
Relationship with the Internet
Tapers have been using the Internet or other Bulletin Board Systems to network with other tapers since the technology first became available in the mid-1980s. The digital networks were really just extensions of social networks. As each new deadhead joins an on-line taping community, the value of that organization increases significantly. “Mathematics says the sum value of a network increases as the square of the number of members. In other words, as the number of nodes in a network increases arithmetically, the value f the network increases exponentially. Adding a few more members can dramatically increase the value of the network.”[39]
The most effective use of the Internet to help facilitate tape trading and the spread of high-quality tapes was through the development of “trees and vines.”
Trees and Vines
Virtual communities such as the WELL provide tapers with a forum to conduct the trading of tapes. Rather than scanning the lists of individual tapers, tape trees and vines provide a way to quickly distribute music to many people at once. A person with a tape they wish to share will open a topic and allow people to “sign-up” for the tree. Once a certain number of people have signed up, or a time limit has been reached, the person who offered the tape will organize a tree. The “seed” tape will be distributed to “root” people who will, in turn, make copies for “branches.” This process can be continued until ultimately all the “leaf” nodes have received a copy of the tape. This is a quick way of spreading music; however when generational sound-loss is an issue, leaf nodes may end up with fourth or fifth generation tapes. The use of DAT effectively eliminates this drawback by removing generational degradation. Therefore tape “trees” lend themselves well to DAT trading.
Another system developed to combat this issue of generational loss is the “vine” distribution method. In this scenario, groups of people are arranged in linked lists. The last person on the list sends a blank tape to the first person on the list. The first person copies the “seed” tape onto the blank tape, making a first-generation copy, and sends it along to the next person on the list. That person copies the first-generation tape for himself or herself and then sends it along to the next person. Eventually the person who sent the blank, having had to wait the longest, will receive a first-generation copy of the tape. All of the people along the “vine” will have second-generation tapes. No one in the system receives higher than a second-generation tape. This is a slower method than the tree distribution; however higher-quality tapes are spread. Because all tapes are low-generation, this method lends itself well to the trading of analog tapes.
Trees and vines are often combined with trees facilitating DAT trading, and vines facilitating the trading of analog tapes. DAT tapes are usually used as “seed” tapes for vines. While this method of tape distribution does not require digital networks, “the ‘Net’s ability to disseminate information to large numbers of traders quickly, has meant a significant upgrading in trading life, with better quality tapes available to more people.”[40]
Growth of the “jamband” scene
The beneficial aspects of allowing taping on concert ticket sales “did not go unnoticed in the music industry. Other artists – such as the Allman Brothers and Phish – began to allow and encourage the recording of their shows. The current crop of young jam bands owes a share of their success to the same kind of taper-fueled word of mouth that benefited the Dead.”[41]
This model of focusing on live events, rather than studio record sales was revolutionary, and marked a significant diversion from the established model. As discussed, the development of tape trading, and DAT in particular had a significant role in the success of this model. Building upon the success of this model for the Grateful Dead, many bands adopted this framework. Acknowledging the trailblazing role the Grateful Dead played, the Dead were awarded a lifetime achievement award at the recent Jammy Awards, the jamband community industry recognition event.
Conclusion
By analyzing the interaction between the relevant social groups in the context of the above frameworks, it becomes clear why DAT taping was embraced by the Grateful Dead community and not by mainstream audio consumers. The factors that led to the successful adoption by Deadheads were missing in the greater audio community.
The technological frame which Deadheads used to understand DAT equipment was fundamentally different from mainstream audio consumers. In addition, the unique technical benefits such as increased tape length were of little consequence to other social groups. Furthermore, the social and economic incentives present in the Grateful Dead community were absent from other social groups’ structures.
It was these factors that led to the successful adoption of this technology by the Grateful Dead community and not mainstream audio consumers. While DAT may be seen as a relic in some communities, it continues to be the format of choice for Deadhead tapers.
DAT taping was the industry’s first foray into commercial digital recording technology. Steps were taken to prohibit unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted material in digital form, and these mechanisms contributed to the demise of the format. As mistakes were made, lessons were learned. There is still no elegant solution to this dilemma, but the right of individuals to legally reproduce digital media has been firmly established by the Grateful Dead community.