The essential skill here is to be able to recognize truth and distinguish it from exploitation. We each have a right to the fruits of our labor, whatever they may be. If we perform, or give away our craft – CDs, performances, song rights, etc. and someone else has engineered the exchange so that we’re cut out of the action, then surely we should have walked away from the situation in the first place.

I’ve often viewed performing as a three-way exchange among the artist, the presenter and the audience. If everyone is honestly doing their job, then it’s always a win-win-win exchange. Everyone comes out enriched in one or more ways. If there’s mis-communication or dishonesty at some point, then the circle is broken. Busking is the simplest form of this exchange, and in some ways the most honest. The street is your presenter, and the street is always honest.

The same things apply to CDs. You can give them away, or sell them. A CD is just a performance divorced from time. We can paint with sound in the studio, and others can listen to the work when and where they wish. In some ways, a CD is more akin to a painting than to a musical performance. It seems to me that the same considerations apply, though.

Ultimately, the only reward for a life spent in music is just that, a life spent in music. There are no guarantees of fame or fortune, only the the knowledge that if you have the fire in your belly to do it, you can. I used to think that some of my friends, who are world-class writers or performers who have “made it”, would eventually gain the recognition they deserve and when they were too old to tour, would be kept safe and warm by the quality of their legacy. I’ve come to realize that perhaps the only reward they’ll reap is the ability to keep doing what they love the most, as long as they live, and to perhaps leave this world without having to suffer the indignity of the infirmities inflicted by advancing age and dementia — if they’re lucky!

The concert tapes for which they condoned trading were the basis of their success in what we would now call social marketing, and that music never stopped, but they only gave those performances away in the sense that “they were done playing that song anyway and why not?”, as I think Bob Weir said recently, or words to that effect.

After I got my first response to that (approximately) 1972 offer I answered, I vigorously consumed to the best of my ability everything commercial they produced until 1995.

You don’t even have to hand discs to people or mail them anywhere-the entire Dead archive can be found at archive.org, and I can’t think of any reason that an artist or a band who is recording their performances wouldn’t post them there.

As I listen to Furthur (the present-day lineup of that band) performances at archive.org, often within a day or two of the performance, I anticipate the day they’ll swing close enough to me that I can buy the ticket, the t-shirt, the CD, the stickers and generally blow my budget all to pieces.