Listen To Grateful Dead Music

Want To Hear Some Right Now For Free?

Sometimes you just want to listen to Grateful Dead music right away without waiting for any files to finish downloading. Everyone likes instant gratification right?

It's coming to be expected more and more these days as we head further into the information age brought on by the growth of the internet. You also may not feel like ponying up for some recurring subscription service that you'll probably never use. For those of you who are jonesing to hear some tunes for free right this very instant - here's my favorite ways to listen to Grateful Dead music online.

There's a few great websites where you can hear all the live Dead concerts you want 24/7. Unquestionably the best one is the Live Music Archive (LMA). They have an enormous collection there - it's kind of like the Library of Congress for concert recordings - and that's no joke! At the time of this writing the LMA has over 53,000 recordings from more than 3,000 different bands.

They have a massive Grateful Dead archive there with nearly 6,000 sources and you can stream every single one. That's close to everything that's in digital circulation on the internet! You know that great show you were at and always wanted to hear again but could never find anyone who had the tape? Well, chances are they have it and you could be listening to it right now.

Live Music Heaven

If you're a big fan of live Dead music or live music in general and you've never been to the LMA then you're going to be in nirvana. When I first discovered the archive there my jaw dropped and almost hit the floor. Before November 2005 you could also download every show and keep a permanent copy but now you can only get the audience recordings. The soundboards are no longer available for download but luckily you can still stream them for free.

To listen to the streams all you have to do is navigate to the show you want to hear and hit play. They have a player embedded in the website so you don't even need a media player installed on your computer. However, you can use your own player if you prefer.

The quality of the variable bit rate mp3 streams that they provide is quite good. I'm a real stickler for sound quality and I find their streams to be more than adequate. They don't seem to be sacrificing good sound for lower bandwidth usage as so many sites with streaming audio have a tendency to do. Of course, personally I would rather download the lossless files to my computer and listen to them in their full glory but as I mentioned you can't do that with the soundboards any more. That's what torrents are for.

If you're interested in other cool ways to get some tunes going then you might like my articles on streaming GD concerts at Wolfgang's Vault and listening to GD radio.

The LMA is without a doubt the best place online to listen to Grateful Dead music or music from any other band for that matter. It's probably one of the largest - if not the largest - archive of live concert recordings in existence. If you're interested in learning more about what the LMA offers you should check out my article on free Grateful Dead mp3 files.

Once you've gotten some instant gratification and scratched that itch to hear some tunes feel free to come back here and browse the site some more. What better way could there be to spend some time while you listen to Grateful Dead music?