We reached our initial goal in just under two exhilarating days! We’re attempting to raise an additional $10,000 by June 17 in order to make the project more efficient and more sustainable. Scroll to the bottom for details about how we’d use the money.

Project Summary

Since 1977, Bay Area punk institution Maximum Rocknroll has been producing a radio show, publishing a monthly magazine, releasing records, organizing shows, and supporting worldwide punk projects. As MRR enters its 40th year, we are undertaking our most ambitious project ever: creating a comprehensive online database of our record collection and music reviews. The project will also see out-of-print issues of the magazine fully digitized. We’re asking for your help to make it possible.

Our collection is the largest assemblage of punk material history on earth. In addition to records, the archive is home to countless rare and unheard demo tapes, zines, photographs, one-of-a-kind record covers designed by the magazine’s founder Tim Yohannan, and flyers dating back to the genre’s inception, many of which will be digitized for the first time. MRR has been instrumental in punk history and historiography, and the archive and database will be an essential resource for record collectors, historians, and anyone interested in punk, hardcore, and garage rock. Imagine Kill from the Heart on steroids or Discogs for the what-we-do-is-secret crowd.

What We Need 

The monthly magazine, published since 1982, is self-sustaining, but we need your help to fund the archive project and its twin goals of long-term viability for our physical collections and a searchable, sortable online database of our holdings. MRR is entirely volunteer-run and independent. Your donation will help fund the various costs associated with a project of this scope.

Our database will be one-of-a-kind, serving as an online catalog and media repository for punk’s material history. There are various costs associated with building and hosting a database of this size, including:

The Impact

Anyone can visit the MRR compound, make mixtapes, and look at (and listen to!) impossibly rare and obscure records. However, most readers of the magazine will never make it to San Francisco. With your support we can make our record collection—the largest of its kind in the entire world—accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

On average, we receive 150 new records each month. Over the course of a year, that’s approximately 1,800 new records. We’re out of storage space in our current configuration. It has been ten years since the collection has been properly inventoried. We recently rehoused our 7” collection, implementing a new organizational system and moving records from cramped shelves to spacious boxes, but nearly all of our LPs are unbagged and some are stuck together with the green tape used to identify records that belong to MRR. It’s essential that we inventory and preserve the collection to ensure its long-term survival.

Risks and Challenges

We have a massive amount of work ahead of us, but we have dedicated volunteers on board to ensure that it gets done right. A professional archivist with years of experience inventorying, cataloging, and preserving media collections is living at the MRR compound in San Francisco to work on the project full-time. We have a programmer on board who has been building the database and a UX designer who will make it easy to use. Over 70 volunteers have already helped out with scanning and transcribing reviews. Our volunteers can make this project happen, but we need your help to cover the costs and guarantee a sustainable future for this essential punk resource.

Other Ways You Can Help

Maximum Rocknroll is and will always be a volunteer-run operation. We welcome Bay Area punks who want to help out in any capacity—just drop us a line! We especially need volunteers for inventorying the collection and helping with preservation work. We also need help with transcription, which can be done remotely. To volunteer, email archive@maximumrocknroll.com.

If you aren’t already a subscriber, become one! We guarantee you will have the most comprehensive coverage of international punk and hardcore in your mailbox every month. We sell t-shirts, tote bags, pins, PDF versions of issues new and old, downloads of our classic compilations, and records by bands like Los Crudos. Check out our store for all that and more.

Special Thanks

Thanks to Michael de Toffoli and Winston Merchan for making our video!

Reach Goals

We’re floored and humbled by the outpouring of support for the MRR Archive. Thanks to your contributions, we’ve passed our $15,000 goal in just under two days. We’re aiming to raise an additional $10,000 in the next month. 

The initial goal of $15,000 was designed to support the first phases of this project but your further donations will make it even better and more sustainable. Every $500 pays for another year of poly bags, inner sleeves, and EP boxes. Every $600 buys another (earthquake-safe!) shelf for new records. With $1500, we can buy four Chromebooks for our inventory volunteers, making the process faster and more efficient, as well as portable scanners to bring into the stacks and more hard-drives to back it all up. At a small DIY operation like MRR, where the people raising this money are also the IT department, the editors, and the archivists, your contribution makes a huge difference. Having access to state-of-the-art, stable technology is essential to making this project a reality.

With your continued support, we can send our archivist to trainings and conferences so she can brainstorm with other professionals about how to make the best and most sustainable resource. We can purchase replacement copies of the records that have been damaged beyond repair, or worse, stolen from the archive. We want our website to be fully accessible for users of all abilities—this too requires money. After seeing the excitement for this project, we have our eyes on a mobile app version of the database. Exceeding our initial goal will allow us to plan even further into the future when we’ll digitize radio shows, our photo and ephemera collections, and our zines database.

Your contribution will go directly towards fully realizing our ambitious vision and ensuring the success of this project for years to come. We also accept tax-deductible donations year round to support the day-to-day operations of the magazine through our website.