The band’s new Play Dead service brings hundreds of live recordings, including many previously unreleased, to a dedicated streaming platform.
The Grateful Dead have launched a dedicated streaming archive, making a vast collection of live recordings commercially available for the first time. The service, called Play Dead, is hosted on the Nugs.net platform and begins with 424 concerts.
It includes 20 previously unreleased vault recordings at launch, with plans to grow. The project is described as the largest tape-transfer effort in rock history, a collaboration between Grateful Dead Productions, Rhino Entertainment, and Nugs. The audio for many shows is presented in high-resolution format.
This initiative finally realizes a long-held idea. The band first partnered with Nugs founder Brad Serling in 2000 for a similar concept called Project Bandwagon, but the technology of the time couldn’t support it. The new service operates alongside the band’s ongoing physical release program with Rhino.
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