When you think of the Grateful Dead, things like acid trips, hippies and four-hour-long blues jams are likely what come to mind. You probably don’t associate the legendary psychedelic truckers with concepts like customer value, social networking and strategic business planning.

But a new article in The Atlantic titled “Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead” shows why the Dead got such a massive, loyal following: business savvy.

Occasioned by the Dead donating its massive archive of memorabilia to the University of California Santa Cruz, the article touches first on the ways the Dead inspired academics to study the band, especially nerdy ethnomusicologists who would risk their reputations to travel with the band and write scholarly articles.

The band’s music and style of purveying it, as well as all the physical goods — posters, bootlegged tapes, records, merch — resembled a galvanizing corporate entity cranking out products that people couldn’t get enough of.

Here’s a graduate thesis topic for you. iDeadhead: How the Grateful Dead was the Apple of the Late 1960s. Go!

The most exciting revelation, however, is the idea that the Dead employed radical intuition when shaping its business policy. Namely, it put customers first. That sounds like common sense today, but back then, few American companies, period, were doing it.

Without intending to—while intending, in fact, to do just the opposite—the band pioneered ideas and practices that were subsequently embraced by corporate America. One was to focus intensely on its most loyal fans. It established a telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement, reserved for them some of the best seats in the house, and capped the price of tickets, which the band distributed through its own mail-order house. If you lived in New York and wanted to see a show in Seattle, you didn’t have to travel there to get tickets—and you could get really good tickets, without even camping out. “The Dead were masters of creating and delivering superior customer value,” Barry Barnes, a business professor at the H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship at Nova Southeastern University, in Florida, told me. Treating customers well may sound like common sense. But it represented a break from the top-down ethos of many organizations in the 1960s and ’70s. Only in the 1980s, faced with competition from Japan, did American CEOs and management theorists widely adopt a customer-first orientation.

Pretty amazing, huh?

And for anyone who thinks the exchange of free music is killing the industry today, the Dead were doing it decades before the MP3.

They famously permitted fans to tape their shows, ceding a major revenue source in potential record sales. According to Barnes, the decision was not entirely selfless: it reflected a shrewd assessment that tape sharing would widen their audience, a ban would be unenforceable, and anyone inclined to tape a show would probably spend money elsewhere, such as on merchandise or tickets. The Dead became one of the most profitable bands of all time.

It’s hard to think of any brand, band or entrepreneur who couldn’t learn a lesson or two from the Grateful Dead.

Over to you: If the Grateful Dead were a band just starting out today, what kinds of things would they be doing and what web 2.0 tools would they be using to market themselves? Tell us in the comments.