Listen to the band:

Entrepreneur, June, 1999 by Sam Hill, Glenn Rifkin

And the Dead never left a promoter in the lurch. If a concert was canceled because of bad weather or a competing event kept the crowds down, the Dead would make it up to that promoter with another concert date.

Create a community. Great bands create a sense of community and belonging, and few did that better than the Dead. A virtual nation of Dead fans incorporated the band into their lives in a way that corporate marketers can only dream about. And the Dead were savvy enough, even in their early days, to tap into this community. They became database marketing pioneers well before the concept grew in more traditional business settings.

Steve Brown, an enthusiastic Deadhead and one of the founders of Grateful Dead Records, recalled the creation of the first Deadhead database in the early 1970s. In Goin' Down the Road, Blair Jackson's 1992 book about the band, Brown recounted:

Around this time, we decided to plug in more directly to all the Deadheads. The "Dead Freaks Unite" campaign, introduced inside the Skull and Roses LP in 1971, had been a tremendous success - we'd built up a mailing list of 30,000 names. To reach even more people, we decided after the Wake of the Flood album to send a Grateful Dead Records promotion booth on our tour with the band. Our gambit worked: We signed up another 50,000 on the 1974 tours.

The most fervent Deadheads attended literally hundreds of Grateful Dead concerts over the years, following the band from venue to venue, sleeping out on cold sidewalks, buying tickets for dozens of shows on a given tour, gobbling up Dead merchandise, and spending countless hours comparing set lists and finding endless nuances in the songs that were chosen and the order in which they were played.

This love and devotion translated into lucrative financial rewards for the band and the small universe of satellite businesses that revolved around it. The Dead became one of the top-grossing bands in the world, averaging $50 million to $75 million in ticket sales each year as it toured major arenas around the country.

The band saw another marketing opportunity in this devotion and went so far as to create a vast database of shows and play lists it calls the Dead-base, which became available in print and on diskettes.

Brand extension with integrity. Like other great radical marketers, the Grateful Dead inspired clever and innovative ways to extend its brand without damaging its integrity. In 1972, for example, the Grateful Dead became one of the first bands to create its own record label, a radical concept at the time, but a way to control quality and retain the spirit of the music they played. The Dead were also among the first bands to inspire vast merchandise sales, specifically T-shirts, posters and stickers of the band's varied logos.

The band members had always been loath to police their concert sites. For many years, they were content to let entrepreneurial fans reap the rewards, as long as copyrighted material was not being co-opted, and allow this marketplace to exist in the parking lots of its concert venues. But they were eventually convinced that they were giving away more than $250,000 worth of potential revenues with each concert. Rather than force everyone out of business, however, the group made a radical decision: Bring in the best and make them legitimate business partners.