Using Australian case studies, Fringe to Famous offers a critical roadmap for understanding the relations between “alternative” creativity and “mainstream” popularity in contemporary cultural industries.

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.

"Fringe to Famous rejuvenates enduring but stale debates between intrinsic and instrumental approaches to cultural value with a fresh take on their productive tension but necessary complementarity. It achieves this while diving deep into diverse and exhilarating histories of Australian cultural scenes of recent decades." - Stuart Cunningham, Distinguished Professor of Media and Communications, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

"I learnt such a lot from this book about the richness of Australian popular culture over recent decades. But it’s also a superb rethinking of the relations between margins and mainstreams in cultural production. Anyone interested in the cultural industries should read it." - David Hesmondhalgh, Professor of Media, Music and Culture, University of Leeds, UK

"Through a deep weaving together of the rich individual stories, communities, and economic negotiations of over four decades worth of pioneering Australian creativity, Fringe to Famous presents a theoretically rich but also very human picture of the complex entanglements of contemporary cultural ecologies. Moving beyond simple binaries of mainstream/alternative, subculture/selling out, independent/co-opted, it situates the economic realities of making a living as an artist within a complex and diverse world where hope for something more, something better as represented by the ‘fringe’ remains very much alive." - Susan Luckman, Professor of Culture and Creative Industries, University of South Australia