Introduction

In earlier chapters we have pointed to the growing importance of the cultural industries in reorienting cultural policy away from its traditional focus on support for the arts towards a more economically motivated set of priorities. In this process, creativity has emerged as a key concept in linking the production of cultural content in creative goods and services with expanding market opportunities for all sorts of cultural product. Rapid technological change, especially in the production and uptake of audio-visual material, has fuelled the growth of industries with low or zero marginal costs of reproduction and distribution, and has catapulted the cultural sector into becoming an integral component of the global information economy. This focus on creativity has led to the same terminological confusion that we noted when defining cultural/creative goods and services in Chapter 2. Should these industries be called cultural or creative and does it matter?

There have been many contributions to the literature discussing this question, some exploring theoretical origins, some getting entangled in semantics, others more concerned with what's in and what's out of any given classification. In practical policy circles, the term ‘cultural industries’ emerged in the UK and elsewhere in the late 1980s, and was transposed to the ‘creative industries’ in Australia in 1994 in the major government policy statement Creative Nation, which sought to chart a cultural policy combining the arts with new communications technologies.