Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive

Primary Sources for Film, Television, Radio, Music, Theatre and Video Gaming, 1880–2020

This digital archive is sure to receive rave reviews from those wanting to know more about behind-the-scenes activities of the music, film, gaming and entertainment industries. By providing major trade and consumer magazines, from their inception to recent times, it arms students and researchers with the primary source material needed to develop a contextual understanding of the entertainment industry as it evolved over the 20th and 21st centuries.

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive is available in five separate collections:

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive 1: Music, Radio and The Stage contains 14 titles and 1.1 million pages of content from such publications as Billboard (1894-2000), Spin (1985-2000) and The Stage (1880-2000). See full title list.

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive 2: Film and Television includes 10 titles and 1.1 million pages of material from key publications like Variety (1905-2000), Boxoffice (1920-2000) and Broadcast (1960-2000). See full title list.

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive 3: Film and Television (Part 2) includes 12 titles and 1 million pages of material from key publications like The Hollywood Reporter (1930-2015), American Cinematographer (1920-2015) and Kine Weekly (1907-1971). See full title list.

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive 4: Music – Folk, Rock & Hip Hop includes titles devoted to major genres of 20th-21st century popular music – with 200,000 pages (at completion) from key publications such as Hot Wire (1984-1994), Paid My Dues (1974-1980) and Vibe (1993-2014). See full title list.

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive 5: Video Gaming includes over 40 titles spanning the 1980s through 2020. Titles cover a variety of consoles/computers and include publications such as Computer & Video Games (1981-2004), PC Gamer (1994-2020) and Edge (1993-2020). See full title list.

Each magazine can be browsed cover-to-cover in full-page, full-text format. Users can search for original reviews, interviews, industry news, listings, charts and features relating to the full range of popular media using advanced search and retrieval functionality.

Use Cases

The collections are ideal for scholars studying:

• • The economics of the entertainment industry
  • Production, marketing and reception of films, music albums or video games
  • Factors surrounding the emergence of subcultures such as punk, two-tone or grunge
  • Culture, politics and social change in dynamic eras such as the 1960s
  • Ways in which the gaming industry reflects attitudes towards diversity

Interdisciplinary Applications

These primary sources cater to the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of research in the arts and humanities. Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive is relevant to research, teaching and learning in cinema studies, popular music, gaming studies, media & communication studies, cultural studies, American Studies, African-American Studies, theatre/drama, sociology, history and more.

Sample Courses

• • History of Film: Development of an Art, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
  • Popular Music Contexts, Goldsmith’s University of London
  • Youth Sub-Cultures and National Identity in Post-War Britain, University of Wolverhampton
  • History of Musical Theatre, Rice University
  • History of Video Games, Emerson University
  • History and Impact of Electronic Entertainment, University of Texas
  • A Critical History of Computing and Video Game Technology, University of Texas
  • Video Game Culture, Metro State University
  • The Business of Game Development, University of Baltimore