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Melody Maker, published in the United Kingdom, was (until its closure in 2000) the world's oldest weekly music newspaper.

Founded in 1926, it was initially targeted at musicians, and soon developed a focus on jazz. In the 1950s, it was slow to cover rock and roll - one notorious editorial describing the new music as "a flash in the pan" - and as a result, lost ground to the New Musical Express (NME). However, by the late 1960s, it had recovered its momentum, aiming at a rather older, more sophisticated market than the teen-oriented NME (which sometimes poked fun at the earnestness of its rival, dubbing it 'Monotony Maker'). Considerably more bulky than its competitor, it had a much larger and more specialised advertising section, in the pages of which many future "name" groups would advertise for musicians to join them, and ran pages devoted to "minority" interests like folk and jazz, as well as detailed reviews of musical instruments. Its circulation continued to increase, and by the 1970s, under the editorship of Ray Coleman, it was selling 250,000 copies a week. Critics such as Richard Williams, Chris Welch and Steve Lake were among the first British journalists to write seriously about popular music, shedding an intellectual light on such artists as Steely Dan, Led Zeppelin and Henry Cow, while the veteran Max Jones continued the paper's coverage of jazz. But then in 1976 came punk, and Melody Maker lagged behind rivals Sounds and New Musical Express in embracing the upheaval; of MM's staff, only Caroline Coon was strongly positive towards the new music. It took some years for the paper's sales and prestige to recover.

By 1983, the magazine had become more populist and pop-oriented, exemplified by its modish "MM" masthead and its choice of Eurythmics' Touch as the best album of the year. In February 1984 Allan Jones, an irreverent journalist noted for his sardonic, boozy interviews with the likes of Lou Reed and Ozzy Osbourne, was appointed editor: defying instructions to put Kajagoogoo on the cover, he instead led the magazine with an article on up-and-coming band The Smiths. This was the catalyst for a sea-change in the paper, which soon took a more serious stance again. In 1986, it was further reinvigorated by the arrival of a group of journalists, including Simon Reynolds and David Stubbs, who had previously run a short-lived but much-praised music fanzine called Monitor from Oxford University, and Chris Roberts, an exile from Sounds, who established MM as the more individualistic and intellectual of the music weeklies (especially after the "hip-hop wars" at the NME - a schism between enthusiasts of progressive black music such as Public Enemy and Mantronix and fans of traditional white rock - led to a victory for the latter faction, the departure of writers such as Mark Sinker and Biba Kopf, and the rise of Andrew Collins and Stuart Maconie, who pushed NME in a more populist direction).

While MM continued to devote most space to rock and indie music (notably Everett True's coverage of the emerging grunge scene in Seattle), it was willing to cover dance music, hip hop and less commercial genres such as post rock and electronica. Even in the mid 1990s, when Britpop had brought a new generation of readers to the weekly music press, it remained less populist than its rivals, with younger writers such as Simon Price, Taylor Parkes and Neil Kulkarni continuing the 80s tradition of iconoclasm and subjective, opinionated criticism. The paper printed harsh criticism of the likes of Ocean Colour Scene and Kula Shaker, and allowed dissenting views on Oasis and Blur at a time when they were universally praised by the rest of the music press.

The magazine wisely retained its large classified ads section, and remained the first port of call for bands seeking musicians, and musicians seeking bands. Many of the groups covered in MM (most famously Suede) had originally been formed through ads placed in the paper itself. It also continued to publish a section featuring reviews of musical equipment and reader-submitted demo tapes - though this often had little in common stylistically with the rest of the paper - ensuring sales to the kind of jobbing musicians who would otherwise have had little interest in the music press.

In early 1997 Allan Jones left MM to edit Uncut. He was replaced, somewhat controversially, by Mark Sutherland, formerly of the NME and Smash Hits, who immediately restyled the paper as a more populist, teen-oriented publication. Many long-standing writers left, often moving to Uncut, with at least one writer (Simon Price, now at The Independent on Sunday), departing specifically because he objected to a new edict that all coverage of Oasis should be positive. Its sales, which had for some time been substantially lower than those of the NME, entered a serious decline, and in 1999 it was relaunched as a glossy magazine, a move which hastened its demise. It folded in 2000, officially merging with the NME (long published by the same company, IPC Media), which took on some of its journalists and (initially) its musical instrument reviews section.

The name of the French band Daft Punk was inspired from a lukewarm Melody Maker review, branding their first efforts under the name Darlin' "a bunch of daft punk".

Other journalists who worked for the magazine include Colin Irwin, David Toop, Steve Sutherland and Andrew Mueller.