What is RILM?

Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) is the world’s premier online resource for music researchers. RILM is best known for its flagship product, RILM Abstracts of Music Literature—an annotated, international bibliography of writings on music with coverage reaching back to the 19th century. RILM has committees around the world tracking music publications originating from 178 countries and written in 143 different languages.

Founded in 1966 by musicologist and sociologist Barry S. Brook, RILM is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to empowering musicians, students, writers, and fans with a vast array of compiled written commentary on music. In our 50-plus years of existence RILM has aggregated the most extensive and diverse catalogue of music writing in existence. For anyone researching a musical topic, RILM is the place to go—as verified by the roughly four-million searches by users every week.

Starting in 2016, our flagship project was enhanced with full text for over 200 music periodicals. In an increasingly digital world, users expect to see not only citations and summations of existing writing, but the writings themselves accessible on their screens. This full-text collection continues to grow annually, fitting RILM’s mission of democratic and inclusive coverage.

Over the past several decades RILM has put increased attention on covering popular music. As a result of this emphasis, we’ve added thousands of citations on popular music from disciplines such as cultural studies and sociology, film and media studies, recording technology and music industry studies, as well as dedicated popular music studies.

To state the obvious, popular music writing isn’t dominated by academics. Journalists, critics, and dedicated fans have a voice on par with scholars in a truly populist discourse on popular music, and our coverage reflects this fact. We believe all of these perspectives may be equally valuable to the music researcher.

Our popular music coverage is curated through a constant search for informative and insightful writings from across a wide range of publications and websites that might otherwise escape notice. In addition to books and published articles, we also include other types of materials including music blogs, podcasts, and self-published zines. No other music literature resource takes such a broad approach.

Thanks to a partnership formed with the Stan Getz Library at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, we currently have access to a stunning and (to the best of our knowledge) unequaled collection of popular music periodicals, collected for student use over the span of decades. These periodicals range from magazines featuring crate-digging longform music journalism to mass-market publications to underground zines documenting music subcultures in real time.

The majority of these periodicals, which span a wide range of genres and scenes, have never been included in a music writing database of any kind. Our goal is to make publications in the Berklee collection available through a full text, digital archive, a project that is now moving from the planning to the execution phase. See the “What Is RAPMM?” link on this website for more details.

We hope that, given our longstanding dedication to popular music writing and our determination to make music literature available through the latest technologies and with the greatest possible ease, you will consider partnering with RILM in our newest enterprise, the RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines (RAPMM).