Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive (EIMA)

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive (EIMA) offers currently two thematic collections covering “Music, Radio and The Stage” and “Film and Television”. Combined they offer access to 35 key US and UK trade and mass-market consumer magazines – weekly and monthly issues, covering the broad spectrum of the entertainment industry and media including film, television, popular music, radio, and theatre. The magazines are included cover-to-cover, from first issue to the year 2000,* (2015 for Collection 3) and the scope encompasses mass-market trade as well as popular titles.

This digital archive can support scholars studying:

• The economics of the entertainment industry
• Production, marketing and reception of films or music albums
• 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

EIMA

• Includes Approximately 3 million pages digitized in high resolution color and fully searchable of key trade and mass-market consumer magazines – weekly and monthly issues
• Offers complete backfiles support analysis of trends in popular culture across the entire 20th century
• Covers the entire entertainment industry, including:
  • film, television, popular music (jazz and blues, rock and pop), radio, theatre, and performing arts, with a focus on the US and the UK
• is cross-searchable with historical databases on the ProQuest platform

* Our policy is to include every issue in full, from the first to the end of the 2000 or 2015 publication year. Due to the rarity of some of the original print volumes, however, small gaps (issues or pages) for some publications may occur.

ProQuest's Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive contains the essential primary sources for studying the history of the film and entertainment industries, from the era of vaudeville and silent movies through to 2000.

• The core US and UK trade magazines covering film, music, broadcasting and theater are all included, together with film fan magazines and music press titles. The magazines have been scanned cover-to-cover in high-resolution color, with granular indexing of all articles, covers, ads and reviews.
• EIMA collections are designed for students and researchers in a wide range of Arts and Humanities subjects such as Cinema Studies, Popular Music and Media & Communication Studies as well as scholars in adjacent fields such as American and African-American Studies, Celebrity Culture and Twentieth Century Popular Culture. They allow students and scholars to find original reviews of films, records, plays, concerts and TV and radio shows as well as factual industry information such as record charts, listings and box office figures. Additionally, they allow users to explore the broader context of popular cultural works, artists, movements and subcultures by reading related features, interviews and news items.
• Trade papers have long been recognized as potentially the single most valuable research material for scholars of the film and media industries. This database includes several trade magazines which have effectively provided the main historical record for their subject areas throughout the 20th century, such as Variety (1905-2000), Billboard (1894-2000), Broadcasting (1931-2000) and The Stage (1880-2000). Although these titles focus primarily on film, music, TV/radio and theatre respectively, they have between them covered the full range of popular entertainments throughout their history, from music halls, circuses and fairs to jukeboxes, gambling machines and computer games.

• Bringing these titles together gives researchers the opportunity to find comprehensive information on specific films, plays, theaters, actors, directors, TV series, film studios, musicians, genres, record labels, subcultures and youth movements. The inclusion of consumer and fan magazines such as American Film (1975-1992) and Musician (1976-1999) means that a search can bring back industry news items, features on technological breakthroughs and in-depth interviews with major artists, together with photographs and illustrations, gossip columns, listings, reviews, charts and statistics. Items such as advertisements, covers and short reviews of films, music singles or other works have been treated as separate documents with accurately-captured titles in order to help researchers find all the relevant material for their search topic.
• For students of popular music, a selection of magazines give in-depth coverage of musical genres and eras, such as 'British Invasion' pop, reggae, African and Caribbean music, or the rave scene.
• Each magazine can be browsed cover-to-cover in full-page, full-text format. Users are able to 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.