The world's leading manufacturer of digital tapes has forged an alliance with fans of psychedelic "jam bands" on the Net that is proving to be a boon for both the fans and the company. On Saturday, KAO Infosystems announced the debut of a new product called KAO Gold, a DAT tape customized specifically to the needs and preferences of the fans who make and swap live concert recordings with the official blessing of bands like Phish, the Allman Brothers, moe., and the Grateful Dead.
"It's very unusual that a huge manufacturer would allow the Net to have such an influence on their product," says Ken Hays, the Deadhead tape trader who launched a mail-order business called Terrapin Tapes in 1992, to short-circuit rapacious profit margins by cassette retailers. Hays orchestrated the feedback loop between KAO and the fans, who furnished suggestions via an Internet mailing list called the DAT-Heads digest.
KAO manufactures tape stock, recordable CDs, and other digital-recording media for companies that repackage and sell them under their own familiar, heavily promoted brands. Though KAO does most of its US$10 billion-a-year business selling tape for data storage and backup to mammoth bit-crunchers like Microsoft, Novell, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard, the century-old Tokyo-based conglomerate perceived an inroad to a viable new niche market in Hays' clientele, who buy 500 to 700 DATs a day to build up their massive home libraries of concert recordings.
The new tape formulation is designed to shed fewer oxides onto recording and playback heads at high temperatures - a necessity for compulsive traders who "run their decks 18 hours a day," and tape concerts in punishing field conditions, says David Gans, the host of a widely syndicated radio show called The Grateful Dead Hour.
The DAT-Heads also demanded that the paper inserts in the tape cases be long enough to accommodate lengthy lists of songs. One of the reasons that traders embraced the DAT format so eagerly, Hays points out, was that a three-hour jamfest could be archived on a single tape.
The tape-trading subculture - which thrives in newsgroups like rec.music.gdead and rec.music.phish, and in the Grateful Dead Forum on America Online - has its roots in the Dead scene. After unofficially tolerating concert taping for years, the Dead inaugurated a "taper's section" at their concerts in 1984, bucking conventional industry wisdom that concert recordings traded freely among fans would damage sales of official releases. The Dead's experiment proved so successful at building a dedicated fan base and boosting ticket sales, younger bands like Phish and Strangefolk have emulated the Dead's example of encouraging not-for-profit trading. Other artists - notably Bob Dylan - continue to vigorously suppress trading of unofficial recordings.
Traders are a notoriously picky clientele. Gans says that online disputes over the virtues and drawbacks of various brands and grades of tape can flare up into the intensity of "religious wars." Kevin Morse of KAO says that though he initially dismissed the trading subculture as "silly," he was won over by the savvy of the critiques of his product on the DAT-Heads list. "These people are a highly technical group," he observes. "They know what they're talking about, and they don't want to be treated like kids."
Both KAO and Terrapin Tapes see the future of digital recording in non-tape formats like recordable CDs and DVD.
"DAT and tape in general are becoming obsolete," Hays says. "CD-R and DVD are the way of the future.... We're looking for an archiving medium that's stable and won't degrade over many years. When you can put a show on a chip - that'll be stable."
