Short version: They ignore their intellectual property (which is NOT property), and let fans do their thing.
I remember flying from Seattle to Las Vegas, the night before a Dead show, with a plane full of Deadheads. The guy next to me said he was “Jonesin’ for some Hornsby” (Bruce Hornsby, who played over a hundred shows with the Dead, from 1988 until founder Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995). My fellow passenger proceeded to pull down a suitcase from the overhead compartment; it was filled with cassette tapes — all labeled and sorted by concert date and location.
Did this taping hurt album sales? No. It served as free marketing for the band. And as David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan point out in their new book, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn From the Most Iconic Band in History, the band went as far as to set up special sections for tapers in 1984. These sections were behind the band’s mixing board and would form a “forest of professional-grade microphones rising to the sky.”
So if there were all these bootleg tapes floating around, has anyone been buying Dead albums? I guess so: the band has had 19 gold albums, 6 platinum albums, and 4 albums that have gone multiplatinum.
In their punchy little book, Scott and Halligan point out that the Grateful Dead turned the “the-band-tours-to-support-the-album” concept completely on it’s head. For the Dead, the concerts are the experience they are selling. The scarce good is that particular night’s performance, and the band makes each performance radically different. The band in its various forms has done over 2,300 shows, and no 2 are alike. Not only have the song lists been different each night, but the band plays different versions of all the songs. Instead of only touring periodically in support of a new album, the Dead has toured constantly.
Committed Deadheads have followed the band around to see hundreds of shows. In some cases these fans support their Dead habit by selling merchandise or food items in the parking lot, and this activity is endorsed by the band. Like Amazon with its affiliate program, the Dead supports anyone who sells band merchandise.
(Read more from mises.org)