NEW YORK — The Grateful Dead, the business, backed down after testing the loyalty of longtime fans of the Grateful Dead, the pioneering jam band, by cracking down on an independently run Web site that made thousands of recordings of its live concerts available for free downloading.
With more than 5,300 signatures on an online petition calling for a boycott of Grateful Dead products - from tie-dyed T-shirts to kitsch emblazoned with the band's dancing bear and skeleton icons - the band's spokesman said the members were still working out an official position on the dispute.
"The band has not fully made up its mind," said the spokesman, Dennis McNally. "Things have already changed, and God only knows if they'll change some more."
The band had asked the operators of the popular Live Music Archive to make the concert recordings - a staple of Grateful Dead fandom - available only for listening online. Files that previously had been freely downloaded were taken down from the site last week. According to the written policies of the archive, a free library that includes many bands' music, recordings are posted only with the permission of the artists.
Dissent rose rapidly as the band's fans - known as Deadheads - discovered that the recordings were no longer available. The online petition threatened a boycott not just of merchandise but also the band's recordings. In particular, fans expressed outrage that the shift covered not only the semiofficial "soundboard" recordings made by technicians at the band's performances, but also recordings made by audience members.
To the fans, the move signaled a profound philosophical shift for a band that had been famous for encouraging fans to record and trade live-concert tapes. The band even cordoned off a special area at its shows, usually near the soundboard, for "tapers" - a practice now followed by many younger jam bands.
But more broadly, it suggested that a touchstone of baby-boomer counterculture - the recording made and shared, sometimes via mail, among hard-core fans - may be subverted in a digital era when music files can be instantly transmitted worldwide.
Phil Lesh, the band's bass player, posted a statement on his own Web site Wednesday, saying he had not known that band representatives had asked Live Music Archive to stop allowing downloads of concerts.
"I do feel that the music is the Grateful Dead's legacy," he wrote, "and I hope that one way or another all of it is available for those who want it."
John Perry Barlow, one of the band's lyricists, said he had had a "pretty heated discussion" on Tuesday with Bob Weir, the Dead guitarist and singer, over the extent of the restrictions.
Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that has fought multiple court cases in behalf of freedom of information on the Internet, said he agreed that soundboard recordings should be restricted, but he said fans should continue to be free to circulate their own tapes, as they have for years. He said the blanket request to the Live Music Archive was driven by Weir and the band's drummers, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann. "It was almost as if they had just discovered it was happening, even though it's been online for at least three years," he said.
The move comes as the group, which disbanded after the 1995 death of its leader and ringmaster, Jerry Garcia, has begun selling downloads of its live concerts through its own official Web site. Surviving members of the band have since played together under the more compact name the Dead, which sells album-length recordings of the shows at $8 to roughly $16 a copy.
The independently operated Live Music Archive evidently posed unwelcome competition.
"One-to-one community building, tape trading, is something we've always been about," McNally said. "The idea of a massive one-stop Web site that does not build community is not what we had in mind."
Barlow said that given the apparent three-to-one split among the four surviving performing members in favor of disallowing the downloads, which comes amid other divisions over the band's business philosophy, he was not sure how the issue would play out.
