JPG: In the context of the book, do you think it was a business hiccup or overall did it make sense when archive.org was instructed to pull any of the Dead’s soundboard recordings and it generated a lot of controversy?
DMS: …Yeah…yeah…you know, we didn’t approach too much post-1995. We didn’t think of this concept until recently and we didn’t have any of the interactions with folks until recently. So, we’re kind of looking to the past. But, I think just some of the modern things, offering the Europe ’72 box set. That’s classic Grateful Dead marketing. The classic Grateful Dead marketing is give away…let tapers into the shows and people can get those Europe ’72 shows one way or another on the web yet people are willing to pay $450 for the deluxe set. To us that’s classic. The other thing is we talked about embracing technology and the Wall of Sound, and how they always had great sound systems. On the 2009 Dead tour they did an iPhone application. Again, classic Grateful Dead. One of the very first bands, I think, that did an iPhone application. Although, I haven’t verified that but certainly one of the first. Even though they started in 1965, all the way out to 2009 when the surviving members get together to play a series of gigs and they’re still out innovating with technology.
JPG: The first portion of your answer references to the chapter on Upgrade to Premium.
DMS: Exactly. It’s like why in the world would somebody pay $450 for something that they can get for nearly the same quality for free. Well, they want it because it is better and it’s got great packaging. It makes you a part of something. And it’s a limited edition. There’s only 7,200 copies. There’s lots and lots of reasons.
JPG: I don’t recall it being covered in the book but the period in the ‘70s when the Dead ran their own record label. Would that be a part of a don’t-be-afraid-to-fail mentality?
DMS: I think part of it was don’t be afraid to fail, but the underlying value seemed to us to always do what’s right for the fans. When they did their own label I think that was a big part of it. ‘We can distribute in a different way. We can have more control over what we’re going to do than those record label people.’ For a variety of reasons it didn’t necessarily work out. But, good for them for trying, right? For wanting to create both the art and the product manifestation of the art in a way that they felt was better for people buying those products.
JPG: When doing the book did you give or any thoughts of doing a sequel…
DMS: We didn’t think at all about doing a sequel. We just wanted to get this out. Brian and I have written a number of other books. So, we’re both writing other stuff. We’ve given thought to what else could come, and we threw out ideas like, ‘Could we think of another band?’
JPG: That’s what I was getting to, if you can think of another band that’s picked up that mantle…
DMS: The answer is ‘No.’ We’re not planning one. We haven’t done anything other than ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if…?’ type of thing.
JPG: But do you see some that have.
DMS: I think if we were to do another one I think we’d do a modern band, Radiohead or somebody like that who’s operating today. What was so cool about the Grateful Dead was the 30-year run from ’65 to ‘95. We approached everything post-Jerry just a little bit different. Doing another older band, I’m not sure I could get into doing that. I wouldn’t even be able to identify somebody that we could draw some business lessons from. When I think about some of the bands, Nine Inch Nails is another good example who have done really interesting things using modern technology, using streaming video, providing audio for free, pay what you want for the music, we’re not even gonna go through a label this time. Crowd-sourced videos like Radiohead did. There’s a lot of really interesting things out there. So, if we were to do it, we would do it on a modern band but there’s no plans whatsoever to do that.
JPG: Do you think other bands such as Phish, Widespread Panic or even Pearl Jam, it’s already been covered by this book?
DMS: There’s a lot to be said with that. I don’t think that Phish thinks that they’re following in the footsteps of the Grateful Dead, necessarily. I wouldn’t know. I’m just saying…but they do a lot of Grateful Dead style marketing things and they also do a lot of things that are very unique to them but in my opinion that wouldn’t be as interesting a book because the band’s music is pretty similar. I would want to do something that was quite a bit different, which is why I’m thinking of…even Lady Gaga, what in the world is she doing to become popular? (slight laugh) Something’s going on there. I don’t know what it is but something’s going on there.
JPG: Early on you mentioned free content. As far as spreading content, what do you think of sites where you have to register? Do you feel that’s putting up a barrier?
DMS: I think that’s putting up a huge barrier. My research suggests that between 20 to 1 and 50 to 1 ratio between those who will register and those who would prefer not to register. We’ll talk about a content unrelated to music for a second, like white papers in the business world. A lot of businesses put out free reports or white papers or ebooks or whatever they’re called to provide valuable information for the people that they might want to reach as potential customers. What most of them are doing is requiring that they register with an email address. The theory becomes that then they can have their sales people follow up. Well, the truth is that people are on to that game. They know exactly why you have to submit an email address and phone number to register for a piece of content, and they simply don’t want to be called by a sales person. For that reason if you have 100 people download a white paper with registration, without registration you would have between 2,000 to 5,000 who downloaded it. So, the Grateful Dead style is to not force people to register. Now there might be reasons why they could voluntarily register to, maybe, be alerted when a piece of content becomes available, that sort of thing. Literally, it’s a form of payment. Giving your email address is a form of payment. What the Grateful Dead was they had a gift system, ‘We will give you this. It’s free, the ability to tape a show. You don’t have to register to tape a show. If you want to, we’ll give you a taper seat but you don’t have to register to tape a show.’
JPG: Marketing Lessons is geared towards business but tell me how these things can be applied towards graduating college students or someone looking for a job in this economy?
DMS: It’s completely applicable to the job search. What most people do when they want to find a job, if they are just graduating from university or they’re in between roles or whatever it is, what they tend to do is two main things. Number one, they write a resume and number two, try and convince their network to pass that resume on to other people. That’s kind of an advertising approach to marketing yourself. It’s treating yourself like a ham sandwich. ‘Here’s my ham sandwich, please buy it.’ Whereas, what the Grateful Dead ideas would teach and what works so well for so many people that I know is if you’re creating great content on the web — you’re writing a blog, you’ve got a twitter feed, you’re creating some interesting videos — in the area that you eventually want to work if you’re a university student or if you’re in the job world already in the area of your expertise. That is a place that then you can leverage to get people to find you. In fact, my co-author, Brian Halligan, is the CEO of HubSpot. I think he’s got just over 200 employees now. And that’s how they find employees. Basically, you’re not gonna get hired at HubSpot unless you’re creating content, unless you’re writing a blog or got a video or doing something on twitter or all three is even better because that’s how they learn about you. They don’t even accept resumes. Then, you’re also set up for when a company comes looking. It’s both ways. A company might say, ‘I ought to find somebody in the Chicago area who is an expert in information technology at a media company,’ and, bang, if you write an information technology blog in the media business, you’re the first person they contact.
JPG: Interesting. Switching gears here, are you still on the advisory board..?
DMS: Yes, Brian and I are both on the advisory board of the Grateful Dead Archives and we donated 25% of the royalties of the book to the archive as well.
JPG: I was wondering if being on the advisory board, you can go in there at any time and play Mickey’s hand drum or…
DMS: (laughs) I really, really, really want to hold one of Jerry Garcia’s guitars. Brian has actually been to the archive in Santa Cruz. I have yet to be out to Santa Cruz but we went to New York when they had some of the items at the New York Historical Society (“The Grateful Dead: Now Playing at the New-York Historical Society” ran from March 5 to Sept. 5, 2010). That was pretty cool. We ended up having Billy Kreutzmann gave us a tour of that, which was really cool. Had him point at the different things and tell us about them for about an hour.
What it really means is that the archive is going through a process of digitizing a lot of the materials in the archive and making them available so that anybody can go online and look at them. And part of that requires money. It’s expensive to do that. So, they’re in the process of raising funds to be able to do that because the band gave the materials but they didn’t give funds to do all the things they need to do. There’s a lot of Grateful Dead fans who are now in a financial position because they are far enough into their careers to be actually donating serious money to an archive, but the challenge is getting the word out. Since we’re marketing guys, we’re actually an interesting group of people to have as part of their advisory board because we can provide ideas for how they can create a better website, how they can do interesting things with the digitized content and to be able to eventually attract more donors to be able to fund all the good works that they want to do.
JPG: You answered what would have been my next question which dealt with whether it as going to be an exhibit at some point or just be all online.
DMS: Well, I can’t speak for the archive. It might be a good interview at some point for you to do. They are planning on showing various things at various times. They had the New York Historical Society thing that ran. I think there’s some things that they actually show at University of California Santa Cruz, but one of the main things that they’re really excited about is being able to digitize all the content so that scholars and fans…and by the way it’s not just Grateful Dead content that’s interesting to anyone who wants to learn about the 1960s, wants to learn about San Francisco, wants to learn about touring, wants to learn about the music business, wants to learn about musicology. There’s lots of different categories of study and interest that the archive will have incredibly valuable information for people to look through. And they’ve got — I might get this wrong — but I think it’s 300 linear feet of stuff and I’m talking about stacked like a phone book. That’s a lot of material. That’s a football field of material. Imagine if it was laid end to end it would probably go from here to the moon. So, imagine trying to digitize all that.
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