German musical life from 1959 to 2016

Starting in 1959 the magazine “Musikmarkt” was the one and only journal for the music business in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The editorial archive and a complete edition of the magazine, which shut down in 2016, have moved to the Center for Popular Culture and Music and may now be inspected there.

The archive includes some 25,300 artists’ photos, from the fields of pop, schlager, German folk music and classical music, as well as around 5,200 slides of events at which the mag was a media partner - including the music fair Popkomm and the Eurovision Song Contest. Those files about the European Song Contest are a highlight of the archive, says the Center’s Knut Holtsträter. “We have press material and recordings of nearly all the songs and artists in the Eurovision Song Contest.”

Because Keller Verlag publishers in Munich also bequeathed the Center a bound edition of the magazine, Freiburg is now one of the few library locations in Germany to have the magazine in its entirety and accessible to readers, Holtsträter says. “From Caterina Valente, Herbert von Karajan, Peter Maffay and Nicolaus Harnoncourt, via the Neue Deutsche Welle, to the rise of rave culture in the 1990s and the many revivals in the start of the millenium, Musikmarkt spans the grand arc between the musical cultures in Germany.   Sifting through the new material will take us a while.”