The two most popular songs across all digital music platforms have been “Ripple” and “Friend of the Devil”
The Grateful Dead catalog saw a significant surge on streaming services after news hit of Bob Weir‘s death. In the five day period of Jan. 9 to the 13, according to numbers compiled by Luminate, there were 9.5 million On-Demand Audio streams of their music, compared to 6.2 million during the period of Jan. 2 to 8 of 2025. That’s an increase of 53 percent.
The most steamed songs in America were “Ripple” (up six percent over last year) and “Friend of the Devil” (up 26 percent over last year). Neither were originally sung by Weir.
The streaming spike is part of a much broader celebration of Weir and the Grateful Dead that has taken place over the past four days. “There are so many people who can rightfully say that their life would not have been the same without Bob Weir,” Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann said in a statement. “That’s been true for me since I was 17. And through it all, the high times and the low tides, my love for him will not, indeed can not, fade away.”
Trey Anastasio felt the same way. “The more I got to know Bobby, the more I liked him,” he wrote in a moving tribute on Instagram. “I learned so much from him…He just loved playing, and I loved that about him. I don’t think he ever got caught up in the bigness. I don’t think it meant anything to him. There were times when I was talking to him when I thought he was the last actual hippie.”
The news of Weir’s death was stunning to most Deadheads since they had no idea he was ill, and he participated in the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary concerts last August in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. They were his final public performances.
“Those performances, emotional, soulful, and full of light, were not farewells, but gifts,” his family wrote in a statement. “Another act of resilience. An artist choosing, even then, to keep going by his own design. As we remember Bobby, it’s hard not to feel the echo of the way he lived. A man driftin’ and dreamin’, never worrying if the road would lead him home. A child of countless trees. A child of boundless seas.”
