Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, museum and hall of fame in Cleveland that celebrates the history and cultural significance of rock music and honours the contributions of those who have played an important role in the music’s creation and dissemination.

Established in 1983 by a group of leading figures in the music industry—including Atlantic Records cofounder Ahmet Ertegun and Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone magazine—the nonprofit Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation was responsible for the creation of the museum and hall of fame, which began inducting honorees in 1986. After considering the bids of other American cities that had been pivotal to rock history (including New Orleans, Memphis, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York City), the foundation located the museum in Cleveland, where disc jockey Alan Freed had coined the term “rock and roll” in the 1950s and which had put together a package of public and private funding to aid in the facility’s development.

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Architect I.M. Pei designed the museum’s striking 150,000-square-foot (14,000-square-metre) glass-dominated building, an angular assemblage of geometric forms set on the shore of Lake Erie. It opened to the public in 1995. In addition to the Hall of Fame, the facility includes a wide variety of frequently changing “permanent” exhibits that draw on the museum’s extensive holdings of artifacts to examine rock music, its origins, and its influence through the prisms of genre, geography, fashion, and biography, as well as social, cultural, and political history.

Typical artifacts include instruments used by famous musicians, stage clothing and props, drafts of song lyrics, correspondence, original album art, handbills, posters, and photographs. Many of the exhibits are highly interactive, and the sound of music is omnipresent. The museum also mounts major temporary exhibits, has a large research library and archives, offers educational outreach, and conducts conferences and symposia. Annex NYC, a branch of the museum that focused on New York City’s contributions to rock culture, opened in Manhattan in November 2008 but closed a little more than a year later, when its financial viability was undermined by the struggling U.S. economy of the time.

Musicians become eligible for induction into the hall of fame 25 years after the release of their first recording. The foundation’s nominating committee, made up of rock historians, selects nominees each year in the performer category, who are then voted upon by an international body of some 500 rock experts. Those nominees with the highest vote total (and more than 50 percent of the total vote) are inducted, five to seven performers being chosen each year. There is often tension between commercial success and reverence by critics in the selection process. Moreover, the committee has been criticized by some for its alleged music industry establishment bias. In addition to performers, categories of inductees include those who were early influences on rock, sidemen (supporting musicians), and nonperformers (e.g., producers, entrepreneurs, journalists, disc jockeys). The annual induction ceremony, held in New York City and featuring performances by inductees and prominent guests, culminates in an all-star jam session.

In 2009 the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum’s 25th anniversary was celebrated with a two-day concert event in New York that featured some of rock’s biggest names.