What is RAPMM?

From the mid-20th century up to the early 21st century, music magazines and zines published much of the most insightful, most well-informed, and most adventurous writing on music. While many self-designated "serious" music periodicals either ignored or disparaged vernacular music during these years—a situation that only began to change in the late 20th century—it was the "disposable" publications of the day that documented the most vital and fast-moving musical worlds, making them not-so-disposable in the long run.

In the pages of these publications conversations took place in real time. Taken together, these zines and magazines now serve as a priceless aggregation of historical data spanning a wide array of genres, scenes, and musical aesthetics. Considering the value of this collective written discourse, there's a surprising dearth of these materials available to contemporary music historians, critics, journalists, and fans. This means that one of the most revealing windows onto musical history—a body of writing tracking not only musical histories but also the social movements, stylistic trends, visual cultures, industry trends, and subcultural formations all closely intertwined with the music—remains shut to all but the most serious collectors of maga/zines.

Our goal is to bring dozens if not hundreds of these publications together in one place, with front-to-back issues of magazines scanned directly from their sources and made available as a digital archive. This approach is designed to preserve the identity and integrity of each publication, allowing readers to engage with these materials in their full context, either searching for specific subjects or browsing entire magazines. Based on a preliminary survey of researchers and librarians, there is great interest in such a collection. The digital archive will be called RAPMM, an acronym for RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines.

The selection of magazines, built on a foundation of just over a hundred titles on long-term loan to us courtesy of the Stan Getz Library at Berklee College of Music, range from familiar mainstream publications to more niche magazines tracking particular scenes and genres, as well as more technical magazines focused on topics such as sound production and specific musical instruments. The collection will also include smaller, self-published fanzines or “zines,” many of which documented new, influential subcultures in real time, and others looking back at scenes and styles retrospectively.

The journalists, critics, and fans who wrote for these magazines served as on-the-ground correspondents, reporting on how it felt to engage with music and what that music meant to individuals in particular times, places, and social milieus. The emphasis on direct documentation, emotional investment, and social context found in these primary sources is exactly what will make this archive an invaluable and unique resource. While digital media has ushered in our current “post-print” age—making survival difficult for many magazines and zines in the process—with the launching of RAPMM we hope to use this same technology to preserve and share primary source truth on popular music, a treasure trove of information and inspiration for fans and researchers alike.