What is the most played Grateful Dead song on Spotify?
By now, everyone knows that the distinction between the best and the most popular is very different. In the streaming age of music, as record labels push for their artists to have a viral hit over creating something adventurous or more experimental, that fact becomes clearer than ever. So, for an act like the Grateful Dead, famed for their vast tracks and lengthy jams on stage, their top streamed songs paint an interesting picture.
It’s a fascinating social experiment, really. Now that streaming platforms are the go-to way to engage in music, the metrics feel different. In the past, people would race out and buy records of their favourite artist’s new albums with little to no prior hint about the content or sound of it, or would read about bands in magazines and either head to a gig to get a live taste of their music before splashing the cash on buying their music, or would take a leap of faith and pick up an album. Start-to-finish listens were the way back then in a time before the shuffle button, so anyone listening to the Grateful Dead had to listen to their music the way they’d intended, in their chosen tracklist order or in whatever form they chose to present themselves at any given show.
Now, control is in the hands of the costume. Decades on from the band’s breakout, all their music and even plenty of live albums are available at the touch of a button. In the age of streaming, we can shuffle it all, building our own queue of songs, crafting playlists and mangling their discography into whatever each individual listener wants. If what a person wants is one of their 20-minute-long jam versions of a track, they can find it. If a vintage shop wants to play their biggest hits out onto the shop floor, they can do that and cut out all the filler or more difficult pieces. If an old fan wants to indulge in a forgotten album track, they can do that just as much as a new fan can discover their most well-known songs for the first time.
Everything is right there for the world to engage with. It’s also right there with metrics alongside it, making it clear which of the band’s songs come out on top as the most popular. Ask the remaining band members, and they’d likely disagree that those songs are their finest work, or as a music journalist and they’d tell you that they don’t feel like the most representative tunes to capture the group’s legacy. But the numbers don’t lie. Certain songs storm ahead of the others as the most streamed and most popular ones.
So, what’s the most streamed Grateful Dead song?
The track that races ahead as the most listened-to Grateful Dead song is ‘Friend Of The Devil’ from the group’s 1970 album American Beauty. Interestingly, this track was never released as a single. Instead, ‘Truckin’ was picked back then as the album’s standout track but still only charted at number 64 in the US. Now, that one sits as their fifth most streamed song, while this album cut has way usurped it.
The thing is that ‘Friend Of The Devil’ is a simple and catchy tune that seems to capture the energy of the 1970s psychedelic, folk-influenced rock scene. It’s actually the sort of sound that people imagine or want when it comes to ‘70s nostalgia, making it a prime candidate for heavy streaming numbers of old fans trying to reminiscence or new vintage-clad music fans looking back through music history. It’s also a song that’s been covered plenty by acts like Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and more modern troupes like Mumford and Sons, meaning that knowledge of the track could even go beyond people’s knowledge of the dead.
But looking through their top streamed tracks and a pattern emerges. ‘Friend Of The Devil’ is closely followed by ‘Casey Jones’, ‘Ripple’ and ‘Touch Of Grey’. All of them are accessible, easy tunes that don’t ask a lot of the listener. These aren’t the long, drawn-out jam sessions that the band used to do on stage. Instead, they’re neat and catchy, making them perfect to slot into playlists or hit play on as a listener goes about their life.
For more serious Dead Heads, these tracks might not be the band’s best. But to the public, they’re the best-loved.
