Fringe to Famous: Indie and Mainstream Cultural Production in Australia

Drawing on dozens of original interviews and close analysis of Australian examples sampled from across 40 years of indie music, comedy, film, computer games, and graphic design, Fringe to Famous explores how some of Australia’s leading cultural practitioners negotiate their position between the margins and the mainstream in the contemporary period.

Fringe to Famous critically re-examines the relations between independent and mainstream cultural production at a time when the very meaning and relevance of those terms is being widely debated. In recent decades, critically-aware artists and their entrepreneurial business partners have engaged in a playful negotiation of marginal and mainstream tastes, harnessing the values associated with the creative underground-transgression, independence, authenticity-for both aesthetic and commercial ends. At the same time, crises in the business models of commercial media industries and the proliferation of online distribution have made mainstream increasingly difficult to define.