It wasn't long, however, before mainstream culture was trying to gobble the underground up too.
And so The Artists Cinema was born, a project that brings the work of visual artists into movie-going audiences' eyelines by inserting them before mainstream films in cinemas up and down the country.
The climax of a three year campaign saw the brand's own social journalists sharing live content from the Olympic Park across a range of social channels, at times breaking news before mainstream news media had even done so.
Its mobile payments platform was adopted well before mainstream advances in mobile payments, like Apple Pay or Square.
It's clear that Twitter is the place that a lot of news breaks first (example), hours before blogs and days before mainstream media.
The service, which is best known for its extremely popular Twitter account, offers very timely, short snippets of news throughout the day, often before mainstream media catches wind of it.
Today we saw yet another illustration, when people in Mumbai got the word of terrorist attacks out to the world well before mainstream media even knew something was happening.
The band existed for almost a decade before mainstream success.
It's a testament to the broad appeal of these characters before mainstream audiences outside of the core comic fans.
However, many alternative rock artists rejected success, for it conflicted with the rebellious, D.I.Y. ethic the genre had espoused before mainstream exposure and their ideas of artistic authenticity.
