The Music Library and Bill Schurk Sound Archives houses a substantial collection of fanzines related to popular music- non-official, sometimes underground publications made by and for fans. While fan-created magazines have been around since at least the 1930s, music zines came out of the DIY ethos of the 1970s punk scene. Today, music zines cover many musical genres, styles, regions; contain record reviews, artist interviews, and live show reviews; and may document the habits of tech hobbyists or the activities of an underground music scene.
Because of the highly personal nature of zine writing, fanzines document the lives and opinions of music fans as well as the fan communities that they create. To scholars of popular music and culture, fanzines are a valuable resource to understand how popular music impacts people's everyday lives.
The Music Library and Bill Schurk Sound Archives fanzine collection also contains some other "grey" commercial material, like newsletters and free weekly magazines, since their content and publication structure is similar to fanzines.
You can discover fanzines through Library Search. You search using keywords, titles or authors in combination with the word "zine" or "fanzine" or by using subjects like science fiction periodicals, fantasy fiction periodicals, rock music periodicals. You can also browse all of the fanzines in the sound archives in alphabetical order by title.