Melody Maker, published in the United Kingdom, was (until its closure) the world's oldest weekly music newspaper.
Founded in 1926, it was initially aimed squarely at musicians, and soon developed a focus on jazz. In the 1950s, it was slow to cover rock and roll, and increasingly took second place to the New Musical Express (NME). Nonetheless, its circulation continued to increase, and by the 1970s it was selling 250,000 copies a week.
The magazine continued to feature rock and indie music, at the expense of covering emerging dance music. It lost sales, and by the late 1990s was relaunched as a glossy magazine. It closed in 2000, officially merged with the NME (long published by the same company), which took on some of its journalists and its popular features on musicianship.
