The Music Documentaryoffers a wide-range of approaches, across key moments in the history of popular music, in order to define and interrogate this essential genre of film-making. The book will be of interest to academics and students as well as film and documentary-makers, musicians and music promoters, and film and music enthusiasts. The writers in this volume argue that the music documentary must be considered as an essential cultural artefact in documenting stars and icons, and musicians and their times particularly for those figures whose fame was achieved posthumously. The pervasiveness of the music documentary across the media testifies to its popularity, cultural importance and the multiplicity of its functions. However, there has yet to be a scholarly book exclusively devoted to the subject. The Music Documentary, which assembles sixteen essays from respected scholars, is a response to this evident need for a full critical engagement. The volume ranges across prestigious television documentaries and promotional fodder, music videos and online documentaries, the counterculture and punk cultures on film, the concert film and the backstage exposé, and new directions in pop music documentaries. The reader will find a comprehensive discussion of the history of music documentaries, insights in their production and promotion, close studies of documentaries relating to favourite bands or performers, and approaches to questions of music documentary and form, from the celluloid to the digital age.