Celebrating, Preserving and Sharing Birmingham’s Music Heritage
Founded in 2008, Birmingham Music Archive (BMA) exists to document, preserve, and celebrate the city’s rich music history, heritage, and culture. Our mission is to ensure that Birmingham’s musical heritage remains visible, valued, and accessible, inspiring audiences today and safeguarding it for future generations.
Birmingham is a city of music and a music city. Yet its contribution is too often overlooked in national and international narratives that focus on places like Liverpool, Manchester, and London. Birmingham does not have one defining sound. Instead, it is home to reggae, metal, indie, ragas, qawwali, bhangra, jazz, rap, folk, and countless other genres. This diversity reflects the city itself, shaped by its neighbourhoods, communities, and the rich mix of cultures that influence and inspire each other. As a cultural and arts organisation, the BMA produces exhibitions, walking tours, talks, youth and community projects, films, radio, and podcasts, all designed to bring Birmingham’s musical past into meaningful conversation with the present.
Our collections bring together information and material on bands, musicians, venues, gigs, promoters, record shops, studios, and the audiences who shaped Birmingham’s music landscape. The archive spans thousands of items, from tickets and posters to photographs, documents, publications, audio, and video. Drawn from both personal collections and institutional sources, and generously gifted to the BMA, we aim to make the extensive and wide-ranging archive publicly accessible through this website and through creative, participatory projects. At the heart of the BMA, there’s also an active community of more than 15,000 citizen archivists who share materials, stories, and memories across our platforms, helping us build an archive that truly belongs to the city.
Birmingham Music Archive: building the archive to inspire the future.
Have something lurking in a drawer or stored in the attic that you’d like to share on our digital archive? We can arrange to scan or photograph your tickets, pictures, scrapbooks and posters and upload them to the site. Just drop us a line via the contact form and we’ll be in touch.
