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Museum Hours

  • Monday: Closed
  • Tuesday: Closed
  • Wednesday: 10am-6pm
  • Thursday: 10am-6pm
  • Friday: 10am-6pm
  • Saturday: 10am-6pm
  • Sunday: 10am-6pm

We are closed on New Years Day, Memorial Day, Easter Sunday, 4th of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Years Eve

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Motown Museum is the beating heart of the extraordinary Motown legacy—a destination that brings together people and ideas from different generations, and celebrates the past while simultaneously building a bridge to the future.

About Motown Museum

To ensure our vast collection maintains public visibility, and to keep things fresh for our guests, Motown Museum changes its main gallery exhibit 1-2 times per year. Here is what’s currently showing at our museum.

Current Exhibit

Motown Museum transports you into an era of musical magic. From the moment you step on the plaza, you’ll be immersed in the Motown sound and will experience a profound sense of history.

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Hitsville NEXT Programs

Our uniquely curated community programs emphasize education, entrepreneurship and equity—with experiences, mentoring and exposure that nurtures and elevates tomorrow’s history makers. Museum programs cultivate creativity and entrepreneurship in budding talent, allowing great art, big ideas and innovation to flourish.

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application Open

Lyric Project


Ages 14-18 | June 18 – 28

Lyric Project is a two-week workshop that helps students learn about songwriting, music production, and communicating powerful and authentic emotions through music...

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Ignite Summer Camp
application Open

Ignite Summer Camp


9 - 12 Grade | July 9 - 19

Ignite is a two-week program designed for high school-aged singers who want to take their musical talents to the next level...

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application Open

Spark Summer Camp


6 – 8 Grade | August 6 - 16

For middle-school students passionate about music, we offer Spark, a day camp that helps students write and perform music together...

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Events

From memorable galas and concert performances, to community celebrations and educational programs, we host a range of special events throughout the year.

All Events

AMPLIFY: The Sound of Detroit Grand Finale


March 16, 2024

Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts

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Private Events

Interested in hosting your own event at Motown?

Facility Rental

Motown Legacy

As an irresistible force of social and cultural change, the legendary Motown portfolio made its mark not just on the music industry, but society at large, with a signature Motown Sound that has become one of the most significant musical accomplishments and stunning success stories of the 20th century.

Discover The Legacy

Like many other African Americans in the early 20th century, Berry Gordy, Sr. and his wife, Bertha Fuller Gordy, came North from Georgia to find a better life for themselves and their family.

Gordy Family

Motown is an extended family of some of the most iconic and influential artists, musicians and songwriters of our time. Brought together by destiny through their love for making music, they found themselves making history.

Motown Artists

The culmination of years of planning, hard work and generous contributions from dedicated donors, the highly anticipated, $50 million Motown Museum expansion project will grow the museum campus to a 50,000-square-foot world-class entertainment and education tourist destination.

Expansion

Support Motown Museum

When you contribute to the Motown Museum, you become part of a rich musical and cultural legacy. We are a 501(c)(3) not for profit, tax-exempt organization in Detroit.

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Museum Hours

  • Monday: Closed
  • Tuesday: Closed
  • Wednesday: 10am-6pm
  • Thursday: 10am-6pm
  • Friday: 10am-6pm
  • Saturday: 10am-6pm
  • Sunday: 10am-6pm
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Museum memberships are an investment in the preservation and conservation of our historic legacy. Become A Member

Birthplace of the Motown Sound

As an irresistible force of social and cultural change, the legendary Motown catalog made its mark on not just the music industry, but society at large. With its catchy melodies and universal messages, the Motown Sound has become one of the most significant musical accomplishments and stunning success stories of the 20th century.

The Sound That Changed America

Part street corner symphony.

Part storefront church gospel. 

Part jazz joint on a Saturday night. 

The Motown Sound jumped out of Hitsville U.S.A.’s Studio A and onto the turntables of teenagers across America. Unlike anything listeners had ever heard, Motown songs married the saintly and the secular—merging the call-and-response patterns of black gospel music with the syncopation and improvisation of the bebop movement in jazz.

Down in the so-called “snake pit” of Studio A, The Funk Brothers backed Motown’s finest artists at all hours of the day—and night. Producers cut and blended tracks, using equipment that can still be viewed in Hitsville U.S.A.’s Control Room. 

The Motown Sound owes some of its uniqueness to the reverb effect created by pumping tracks through the label’s Echo Chamber, in the days before computers and synthesizers. 

True to his commitment to quality, Berry Gordy, Jr. would not slap a Motown label on every song his producers offered. Artists and producers sweated it out each week at notoriously competitive company-wide meetings, hoping to pass muster and see their songs released for sale to an eagerly awaiting public.

Even some of Motown’s iconic recordings were not deemed fit for release the first time they came up for review. Tunes that never made it to the airwaves—as well as blockbuster hits like ‘What’s Goin’ On’ and ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’—were often sent back for more work after being heard by the discerning ears of the label’s hit makers.

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