Festival Records

Festival Records (later known as Festival Mushroom Records) was an Australian music recording and publishing company which was founded in Sydney in 1952 and operated until 2005. Festival was a wholly owned subsidiary of News Limited from 1961 to 2005, and the company was very successful for most of its fifty-year life, despite the fact that as much as 90% of its annual profit was regularly siphoned off by Rupert Murdoch to subsidise his other media ventures. Festival was established by one of Australia's first merchant banking companies, Mainguard, founded by entrepreneur and former Australian army officer Paul Cullen. Mainguard had a wide range of investments including one of Australia's first supermarket companies, and a whaling...