Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last two weeks you will have heard about the 50th anniversary and celebratory ‘Fare Thee Well’ grand finale of Grateful Dead concerts.
Consider that if you were a 15 year old, influenced by the band’s earliest shows, today you’re 65. And, if you were among the lucky attendees of the band’s record breaking final shows it was likely you were joined by concert goers who were born in the year 2000. Such is the rich and far reaching mystique of The Grateful Dead’s music, community and followers.
Content Archiving from Dead.net
But if you can’t be bothered to differentiate “Friend of the Devil’ from ‘Box of Rain’ consider an aspect of The Grateful Dead that transcends its eclectic, impromptu jams. The band’s history of live shows coupled with a proclivity to allow/encourage its fans to record these shows translates into archives – very big archives of music. According to this feature in Wired, in retrospect, by supporting the recording and sharing of its concerts, The Grateful Dead has had a tangible and influential impact on the tech industry.
A recent New York Times article addresses Grateful Dead ‘tapers’ within which it references the size a scope of the band’s content…
“…the entire opus of the Grateful Dead online – more than 10,000 recordings, including multiple sources for some shows, across 12 terabytes of data.”
According to Neatorama…
“12 terabytes of data are roughly equivalent to:
– 5,280,000,000 single-spaced typewritten pages
– 1, 006,633 phone books
– 19,358 regular compact discs
– 2,614.5 DVDs
– 61.4 average-sized hard disks (200 GB)
– 9.6 human brains (the capacity of a human being’s functional memory is estimated to be 1.25 terabytes by futurist Raymond Kurzweil in The Singularity Is Near)
– All the data from Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope”
For tapers and their followers Seagate has the storage tools needed for a lifetime of content archiving and playback. If you’re just getting started as a content archivist consider our Personal Cloud Home Media Storage, which provides up to 8 terabytes of capacity , which is enough to keep you busy for a long while. But, if you’re among The Grateful Dead’s fan-base who went on to ‘pioneer’ the tech industry you’re more likely to opt for Seagate’s WSS NAS 2-Bay, 4-Bay, 6-Bay, which is capable of storing all 12 terabytes of the band’s online archive.
