It was created as a way of celebrating and raising awareness of Greater Manchester's musical heritage and protecting collections of material held by individuals and institutions relating to the subject.
[2] Realising the subject was too vast to be contained within a documentary, Surtees and Norman, alongside Dave Rofe and CP Lee, decided to launch a campaign to create a Greater Manchester music museum.
[3] A seminar was held at Urbis in 2004 to officially launch the newly constituted organisation with a panel featuring Jon Savage, CP Lee, Guy Garvey, Mark Radcliffe and Jan Hargreaves.
Hundreds attended the event and it was announced that the intention was to set up a museum where people could donate items of music ephemera to the collection.
Users are encouraged to provide memories and anecdotes along with their artefacts and the only stipulation is that items need to be linked to acts or venues from Greater Manchester.
The event included music and discussion and also showed the premiere of the Tim Forde documentary 'Birth of The British B-Boy', which tells the story of breakdancing in Manchester.
There were a number of spin-off events featuring Greater Manchester music luminaries in conversation, including Barry Adamson,[12] Kevin Cummins[13] and Richard Boon.
[14] In 2014 the project ended with a community concert at Band on the Wall[15] featuring British rave pioneer Graham Massey in collaboration with The Prospectors, a collective of disabled musicians from Stockport.
In 2014 MDMarchive hosted a panel discussion which saw Elbow's Guy Garvey, Jaheda Choudhury-Potter of Ajah UK and Everything Everything's Jon Higgs talk about Greater Manchester lyricism in music.