The deadhead phenomenon is a hard group to study simply because people did not begin to look at the group empirically until the mid to late eighties, so the subculture had already been in effect for nearly twenty years. It is hard to get a clear number in the amount of deadheads there actually are simply because they are all over the country and not every deadhead goes to every Grateful Dead concert and even if they did there would not be nearly enough seats in any concert venue to hold the amount of deadheads there actually are. The Grateful Dead organization distributes information to about 290,000 deadheads, but it is though

Religion plays a huge role in the life of the deadhead. Although they tend not to believe in traditional religion they have constructed there own religions around the music of the Grateful Dead. When outsiders refer to the deadhead one description that always comes up is, a group of people that religiously follow the music of the Grateful Dead. And that idea is true because going to the concerts plays a big role in their religious experiences with the music. The basic idea is that this religion is non-traditional and is based on Shamanism. (Sutton 2000) There is also a subgroup to the deadheads that refer to themselves as ¡®the family.¡¯ This is a group that is deeply rooted in religious ideal. They refer to themselves as the Church of Unlimited Devotion. (Hartley 2000) There are also two other major subgroups to deadheads, the tapers and the Wharf Rats.

There was a study that was conducted on deadheads during the spring tour of 1993 and there was a self-report on the annual income of deadheads before taxes. The distribution varies from zero dollars to sixty thousand dollars a year, with an average of about fifteen thousand dollars a year, and fifty percent of the people had incomes of about ten thousand dollars. (Lehman 2000) This information says that this population is below the average in America, but what this study does not include is the money that is earned in the ¡®underground¡¯ economy of the deadheads. Outside of the concerts there is vending that goes on. It is something that resembles a bazaar, people sell just about everything ranging from food, clothes, concert ticke

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