A Grateful Dead analysis: The Relationship between Concert and Listening Behavior Analysis

The Grateful Dead was an American band born out of the 1960s San Francisco, California psychedelic movement, that played music together from 1965 to 1995. Despite relatively little popular radio airtime, while on tour the Grateful Dead enjoyed a cult-like following from a fan base that numbered in the millions. Still today, some ten years after dissolution, the band remains popular according to online music services, such as last.fm. This article presents a comparative analysis between 1,590 of the Grateful Dead's live concert set lists from 1972 to 1995 and 2,616,990 Grateful Dead listening events by last.fm users from August 2005 to October 2007. While there is a strong correlation between how songs were played in concert and how they were listened to by last.fm members, the outlying songs in this trend identify interesting aspects of the band and their present-day fans.