CMJ
American music events and online media company
CMJ Holdings Corp. is a music events, online media company and a distributor of up and coming music CDs, originally founded in 1978, which ran a website, hosted an annual festival in New York City, and published two magazines, CMJ New Music Monthly and CMJ New Music Report. The company folded around 2017, but it was bought by Amazing Radio in 2019, who announced plans to bring back the CMJ Music Marathon in New York along with other new live and live-streamed offerings. The letters CMJ originally stood for College Media Journal but was also often considered short for College Music Journal.
History and operations
The company was started by Robert Haber in 1978 as the College Media Journal, a bi-weekly trade magazine aimed at college radio programmers in Great Neck, New York. The first issue was published on March 1, 1979, and featured Elvis Costello on the cover. Staff would often describe these early issues as "a bunch of photocopies stapled together."
A year and a half later, the magazine was able to create the first annual CMJ Music Marathon, which was named after the New York City Marathon held at around the same time of year. About 100 people attended, and there were no showcases.
In 1982, the magazine officially rebranded as CMJ New Music Report.
CMJ continued to grow, and by the 1990s, Haber and the CMJ staff wanted to stay connected to the college radio scene, but felt unable or unwilling to pay the high price for a subscription to a trade publication.
“CMJ” enters the record as american music events and online media company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what American, music and events can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“CMJ” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, American, music and events provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5012897. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1978, 2017, 2019 and 1979.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “CMJ”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow CMJ primary sources, CMJ archive and American research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “CMJ”?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “CMJ” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.