No band has given away as much of their music as the Grateful Dead. As crazy as it sounds, this legendary jam band from San Francisco made giving away their music a pillar of their business plan. Without the benefit of widespread radio airplay or mainstream media coverage, the Grateful Dead used the power of generosity to spread their music and their brand, making them consistently one of the top-grossing touring acts of their era. From April 1965, when they formed in Palo Alto, California, until July 1995, just prior to the death of founder Jerry Garcia, the band played more than 2,300 shows together. Aside from a short hiatus in 1975, they were perpetually on tour. The Grateful Dead makes the entirely unsubstantiated but highly believable claim to have played more free concerts than any band in the history of music.
The Grateful Dead turned their little jam band into a marketing machine, selling millions of concert tickets, over thirty-five million albums, and raking in tremendous profits by licensing their music, image, and artwork. The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 and are ranked fifty-seventh on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the Greatest Artists of All Time. Without question, the Grateful Dead will go down in history as one of rock’s greatest bands. What makes their story so compelling is that they accomplished all of this without the usual tools: they had essentially no radio airplay; their songs hardly made an impact on Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 chart; they didn’t make music videos. Instead, the Grateful Dead leveraged their generosity to create a community, and the community supported the band.
Long before illegal file sharing and downloading, music was pirated through bootleg tapes, essentially live recordings of concerts. If you ever read the tiny print on the back of a concert ticket, you probably would have read a paragraph about how any recording of the concert was prohibited by law. The music industry has always been extremely vigilant in preventing the recording and distribution of tapes of live shows, believing that these recordings would eat into album and ticket sales. The Grateful Dead had a different idea, one that went completely against conventional business and industry wisdom. The band believed that if the fans could record and share their concerts, they would bring new fans into the community. Since most radio stations and mainstream media ignored the eclectic band, they believed that they could use bootleg tapes to help them spread the word.
Instead of preventing taping and prosecuting “tapers” who recorded concerts, the Dead decided to encourage the process. They invited tapers to set up their recording equipment in special sections, often allowing them to plug directly into the soundboard to get the best possible quality. While other bands confiscated recording devices from their fans to prevent them from bootlegging their concerts, the Grateful Dead actively facilitated it. The band helped people record the shows, and then they encouraged people to share the tapes, asking only that they be given away, and not sold for profit.
To make every tape more valuable, the band played a unique set each night, altering their song selection for every concert. As a result, certain shows became monumental collectors’ items. When the band played a particularly rare selection or had an unusually great show, fans clamored to get the tapes. While most bands played the same basic set list each concert, the Grateful Dead went out of their way to do something fresh each show. Sometimes it worked, and the results were electric. Sometimes it didn’t turn out as well. But no matter what the outcome was, the uniqueness of each concert created a demand for their music that would never have existed if the band had played the same set night after night.
The band’s logic contradicted the prevailing wisdom of the music industry, which was still very much hung up on preventing bootlegs from taking away album and ticket sales. It turns out that, at least in their case, the Grateful Dead was right. Throughout the 1970s as the band toured relentlessly, their fan base grew exponentially. Despite having very little exposure on the radio or TV, the network of Deadheads stretched around the globe, ensuring that the band could sell out nearly every city on every tour. The tapes were a key part of the band’s growth, since you could seldom hear the Dead on the radio. Friends who discovered the band shared their tapes with their friends. Older brothers played their tapes for younger brothers. Those already in the tribe of Deadheads used the tapes to invite new members into the group, thereby creating an exciting sense of community around the band’s music.
To enhance the experience, the Grateful Dead actively sought out the mailing addresses of their fans and invited them to be a part of the group’s fan club. All they did was put a simple note inside the sleeve of an album, asking fans to send them their mailing address. Thousands did. The band responded by sharing special things with them, like advance concert news or samples of music they were working on. This tiny seed grew into the largest “fan club” in rock history, the Deadheads.
Once firmly in the tribe, some fans would embark on a quest to see the band as many times as possible. Thousands of Deadheads would follow them from city to city, all summer long. Taking a few months off work to follow your favorite band across America isn’t free, so the band took steps to help these hard-core fans make money. They created an area called “Shakedown Street” where the traveling fans could set up booths to sell everything from tie-dyed clothes to burritos. With a source of income, the Deadheads could afford to put their money back into tickets, transportation, and accommodations so they could continue to follow the band on tour. This process continued unabated for decades.
Today, nearly twenty years after the passing of bandleader Jerry Garcia, variations of the band continue to tour. If you get the chance to see Further, The Dead, or even Dark Star Orchestra live in concert, you’ll witness the enduring legacy of the Grateful Dead. It isn’t quite the same thing, but it definitely is the next-best thing.
The Grateful Dead had only one hit song, a Top 10 hit in 1986 called “Touch of Grey.” It came relatively late in the band’s career. For the previous two decades, you simply never heard the Grateful Dead on the radio except on some fringe progressive rock radio stations. The band wasn’t invited to play on The Tonight Show, and they didn’t do the soundtrack for any hit movies. They didn’t lip synch on Top of the Pops or Solid Gold. The Grateful Dead achieved their success by giving stuff away and creating a vibrant and powerful community.
To witness the power of giving in a more modern and high-tech light, imagine you could rewind time by a decade or so and place bets on the odds of success for one business model over another. You could invest in one of two rival encyclopedia companies, rushing to fill the gap as the world moved from paper to digital knowledge storage. Company number one was Microsoft, and their product was Encarta. Microsoft hired some of the brightest minds to compile the world’s written knowledge into an electronic version. With Bill Gates’s deep pockets, they poured millions of dollars into creating the world’s best electronic encyclopedia.
Company number two was a ragtag group of volunteers who assembled information in their spare time for no profit at all. These volunteers approached other experts to share their knowledge on very specific topics, and they all worked diligently to make sure the information was vetted and accurate. They drew no salary, and none of the contributors were paid or even acknowledged for their contributions. They called their project Wikipedia.
After investing and losing many millions of dollars on it, Microsoft finally put Encarta to rest in 2009. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has become the world’s go-to source for information on nearly every imaginable subject.
Most of us would have placed a confident bet on Microsoft. We would have doubled down if given the chance: all in. And we would have lost it all.
Encarta seemed like a really good idea. Microsoft wasn’t crazy at all; they built Encarta by purchasing the digital rights to various print encyclopedias and combining the printed word with multimedia sounds and videos. It was a giant leap forward in how we digest information, and Microsoft was the perfect company to lead it. Encarta was a respectable product, and at its peak it boasted more than 62,000 articles.
Today Encarta is long gone, and Wikipedia has more than twenty-four million articles, including 4.1 million in English alone, edited by a team of over one hundred thousand active volunteer collaborators. The entire project is overseen by the not-for-profit Wikipedia Foundation. It is created, maintained, updated, moderated, and promoted entirely by volunteers. For free.
We live in changing times, and sharing is more practical and prevalent than ever. The connectedness that the Internet has brought about has facilitated sharing at a level never before seen in human history. Want to install a dishwasher? Don’t call a plumber or an electrician; just Google it. There are dozens of YouTube videos on the topic. Or you can easily find step-by-step instructions on hundreds of different websites. Looking for a recipe to replicate McDonald’s’ famous and top-secret Big Mac sauce at home? The not-so-secret recipe is right there online, put there by McDonald’s themselves, for you to attempt right in your kitchen. From the dangerous to the invaluable, almost every piece of knowledge you need is being shared right now on the Internet.
As an author, I learned firsthand how to maximize sharing. In the spring of 2009 I began work on my first book, Brand Like a Rock Star. In those early days, I didn’t realize I was working on a book. It was just a blog about the lessons we could learn from rock ’n’ roll that could be applied to business. A few months after I started blogging, I received an email from David Meerman Scott, author of the best-selling books The New Rules of Marketing & PR and Newsjacking. David had read a piece on my blog (about the Grateful Dead, coincidentally) and emailed to let me know that he enjoyed my perspective. It was David who suggested that I turn the ramblings into a book. By simply freely sharing my thoughts on a topic I was passionate about, I found myself writing a book.
The blog continued to evolve over two years, and in 2011 I began to refine and improve on some of the more relevant blog posts. From almost one hundred posts I was able to pare it down to the most powerful and popular twenty posts. With plenty of editing and expanding, those posts became the twenty chapters that make up Brand Like a Rock Star.
Sharing those chapters online first was vital to the book’s success. The feedback I received from readers allowed me to improve on every topic. In some cases, readers corrected information that was inaccurate. In other cases they changed my thinking on certain topics. In every case the input from my readers allowed me to think about what I was communicating in a fresh way, which no doubt improved the final product.
Like the Grateful Dead, I continued to share my work online as this book came together. Early versions of several chapters were posted on my blog at www.brandlikearockstar.com, and readers commented extensively on what I was writing. Sharing these chapters-in-progress not only made the finished book substantially better, but it also helped to build a community of like-minded people who had made a material investment in the book. Instead of just another book, this became a book that several thousand people had a hand in creating. I am extremely grateful to all of them.
Are there risks involved? Absolutely. I have read many pieces that have either blatantly or subtly ripped off something I wrote. In some cases, I’ve had to talk myself down from calling my lawyer! In most cases, I make a point of reminding myself that the benefits strongly outweigh the risks, and I continue to share and give, knowing that—as the New Radicals sang—“You get what you give.” Or, as the Beatles said, “In the end / the love you take / is equal to the love you make.”
Here are some fantastic examples of how people are benefiting every day from giving and sharing:
Sometimes giving involves spending money on actual gifts, as in the car dealership example. But many other times, giving isn’t about hard objects but instead about knowledge, advice, guidance, friendship, and support. In every case, however, the act of giving is a direct link to future business success.
The home improvement store gives away knowledge realizing that, when empowered with the knowledge, you are infinitely more likely to come back to that store to purchase the material you need to complete your home improvement project. Notice that they do not make purchasing your material from them a deal-breaker. The knowledge is given away free, with no strings attached. That’s what makes it powerful! If the knowledge is conditional (“buy your materials here and we’ll show you how to install them”) it can never carry the same punch. People are suspicious of such giving, because it really isn’t giving at all. It is selling. It is a gift-with-purchase, not an honest gift.
The best giving is when you give away something of value, whether it is knowledge or product. It needs to be free, with no strings attached. And the best giving is personal, never generic. A gift that matters to the recipient delivered in a personal way from the giver is always the most powerful.
When the Grateful Dead gave their fans the powerful and personal gift of music, with no obligations attached, it helped a quirky band with little mainstream appeal build the biggest and most influential fan base in rock history.
As an individual, what can you give away? Your time and your knowledge. Your spirit, energy, and enthusiasm. Your expertise and experience.
Where can you give it away? At home, at work, with friends. You can give it away to total strangers.
You can, quite literally, change lives if you are willing to treat your knowledge, experience, creativity, and spirit with an abundance mindset. Stephen Covey famously coined the “abundance mindset” in his landmark book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It is in contrast to the mindset that most people seem to have, which is a scarcity mindset. We often use the scarcity mindset to convince ourselves to hoard our possessions and our knowledge, for fear that there won’t be enough to go around. If I share my knowledge with you, it is no longer mine … and therefore I am no longer indispensable to the company. The abundance mindset rejects that notion and allows us to look at the potential for a win-win situation. When I share my knowledge with you, not only do you get better at what you do, but I also improve in the process. Both of us become more indispensable to our employer. Once you adopt the abundance mindset, you throw the idea of a zero-sum game out the window and become willing to share and give without expectation, knowing that ultimately you will benefit.
Covey believes that people with a higher sense of self-worth are more likely to have an abundance mindset. Their lack of insecurity allows these types of people to not concern themselves with the threat that sharing might present and instead celebrate the positives that come to all involved, including the organization, when knowledge, experience, and energy are shared.
It certainly worked for the Grateful Dead. The fans got free music. The band got rich. And the world was left with a sonic legacy that will never disappear.
