Dead Daily is a free daily listening game for Grateful Dead fans. Every day a fresh thirty-second clip is drawn from a live concert recording and your job is to guess the year it was played. You get four tries with directional hints after each wrong answer. That's it — the rest of this page is background, strategy, and notes on how the thing is built.
Press play to hear a thirty-second clip from a real Grateful Dead concert recorded somewhere between 1965 and 1995. Type a four-digit year and submit. If you're right, the game ends and the show details are revealed. If you're wrong, an arrow tells you which direction to move: an up-arrow means the real year is later than your guess, a down-arrow means it's earlier. You have four guesses per day. Run out and the answer is shown anyway so you can explore the show.
There is one clip per calendar day and it's the same clip for everyone. A new one drops at midnight Pacific. If you miss a day you can play it later from the archive, though missed days don't count toward your daily streak — we only count games played on the day they ran. Your progress, streak, and theme preference are stored in your browser's local storage; no account is required.
After each wrong guess the game narrows the remaining year range. The directional arrow tells you the correct year is higher or lower, but it doesn't tell you by how much. Experienced players treat this like a binary search: guess the midpoint, listen to the clip again with the remaining range in mind, and guess the midpoint of the new range.
A naive midpoint strategy will get you inside a three- or four-year window in three guesses, which is usually enough if you can distinguish the big eras by ear. The fourth guess is for when the sound falls on the boundary between two adjacent eras — late '71 versus early '72, for instance, or the Brent-to-Vince transition in 1990.
The fastest way to get better is to stop guessing random years and start learning the band's arc. The Grateful Dead toured for thirty years and their sound changed completely several times. Here are the rough eras and the things to listen for.
Raw, exploratory, sometimes chaotic. Pigpen on organ and harmonica, short blues and R&B covers giving way to long psychedelic jams ("Dark Star," "The Other One"). Audio quality is often rough — hiss, dropouts, mono mixes. If the clip sounds like an acid-test recording stuck in a can, you're in 1966–1968. By 1969 the band is tighter and the songs from Live/Dead are in rotation.
Shorter, song-focused sets dominated by material from Workingman's Dead and American Beauty. Keith Godchaux joins on piano in late 1971 and the sound opens up noticeably — listen for bright acoustic piano under the jams. "Playing in the Band," "Cumberland Blues," and "Tennessee Jed" are clues for this window. Europe '72 is here, and those recordings are famously well-engineered.
The band built an enormous custom PA system and toured it through 1974. Recordings from this era have a distinctive clarity and depth — you can often hear the separation between Jerry's guitar and Phil's bass more clearly than at any other time. Long-form jamming hits a peak; "Eyes of the World" and "Weather Report Suite" debut in 1973. The band steps away from touring at the end of 1974, so that year is relatively compact.
1975 is a near-hiatus year with only a handful of shows. 1976 is the comeback. 1977 is widely considered one of the finest years of the band's career — Jerry's playing is particularly fluid and the Cornell 5/8/77 show is legendary. Late 70s recordings start to feature a longer "Drums" and "Space" segment in the second set, which becomes a permanent fixture.
Brent Mydland joined on keyboards in 1979 and his Hammond B3 and soulful vocals completely change the texture. The band is playing bigger rooms, the mixes are cleaner, and Brent's backing vocals are unmistakable — a grainier, more forceful voice than Donna Godchaux's before him or Vince Welnick's later. If you hear a prominent organ swell and a gravelly harmony vocal, you're almost certainly in 1980–1989.
The band has its one and only Top 10 hit ("Touch of Grey") in 1987, the crowds get dramatically bigger, and the production gets slicker. The playing is confident and sometimes a little polished relative to earlier years. Brent's songs ("Blow Away," "I Will Take You Home") appear. 1989 and early 1990 are often singled out as a late-career creative peak. Brent dies in July 1990.
Vince Welnick's keyboards — often synthesized — give the late years a noticeably more electronic texture. Bruce Hornsby also sits in on piano for much of 1990 and 1991, which produces a distinctive sound that's worth learning to recognize. Jerry's voice is often strained and the playing is more uneven, but there are spectacular shows throughout. The final tour is summer 1995; Jerry dies in August.
Every clip is drawn from the Internet Archive's Grateful Dead collection, one of the largest live-music archives in the world. The band famously encouraged tapers to record and share their shows, which is why thousands of audience and soundboard recordings exist in the public domain. We pull a track from a show, grab a thirty-second slice from somewhere in the middle, and normalize the volume so you're not comparing a washed-out AUD tape to a hot SBD straight from the desk.
The catalog behind the game currently includes more than 1,300 distinct show dates. You can browse every date the game draws from on the shows page, and after you play you can open the full concert recording on the Internet Archive directly from the show page.
Listen for the keyboard. More than any other instrument, the keyboard pins down the era. Pigpen's organ and harmonica live from 1965 to 1972. Keith Godchaux's acoustic piano is 1971 to early 1979. Brent Mydland's Hammond and Wurlitzer are 1979 to 1990. Vince Welnick's synth textures are 1990 to 1995.
Listen for tempo. Early Dead is frequently faster and looser. Post-1987 shows tend to be more relaxed and deliberate. If a jam feels spacious and the band sounds patient, you're probably in the 80s or 90s.
Listen for audio quality. Mono, hissy, or distant recordings skew toward 1966–1971. Clean, full-range soundboards with crisp high end often come from 1977 onward. Wall of Sound recordings have a characteristic depth that's hard to mistake once you've heard a few.
If you're stuck, guess a safe midpoint. 1977 is almost never a bad first guess — it sits roughly in the middle of the touring years and there are so many shows from that decade that the odds of being in the neighborhood are reasonable.
No. Dead Daily is made by fans and is not affiliated with the Grateful Dead, the Jerry Garcia Estate, Grateful Dead Productions, or the Internet Archive. We're playing with publicly-available recordings the band itself encouraged people to share.
It's enough to place the era by ear but usually not enough to identify the exact song, which would be too easy for hardcore fans. We also try to pick segments that don't include spoken introductions that give the date away.
Yes. You can listen as many times as you want before submitting a guess. Replaying a clip doesn't cost you a life.
The daily pick is selected from the full catalog with some weighting toward variety — we try to avoid repeating the same year several days in a row, and we try to balance across eras over the course of a month.
Yes — practice mode lets you filter by year range. Practice rounds don't count toward your streak, and the shows are drawn from the same catalog as the daily game.
Show dates come from the Internet Archive metadata and occasionally the metadata is wrong — usually for very early-1966 or very late-1965 shows where the venue and date are approximate. If you spot something that looks off, email hi@deaddaily.org and we'll take a look.
No. The web site works on phones and tablets and you can add it to your home screen from most mobile browsers.
After a game ends you'll see a share button that copies a spoiler-free summary to your clipboard — the year, how many guesses it took, and a link back to the game. You can paste it anywhere.
Even if you've been listening to the Grateful Dead for decades, guessing years by ear is a specific skill and it gets sharper quickly with daily practice. Newer fans tell us they've used the game as a structured way into the band's catalog — a deliberate thirty-year course delivered in thirty-second installments — and the archive lets you revisit any past day to compare how two adjacent years actually sounded.
After you play, the show page for each day includes notes on the venue, the era, what was happening in the band's life at the time, and a direct link to listen to the full concert on the Internet Archive. That's often the best part of the game — the thirty-second clip is just the door in.