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Given that a handful of transnational, synergy-producing conglomerates dominate the global markets for film, television, print, and music, and exercise an inordinate amount of power across these cultural sectors today, one would expect that media political economists might engage with the culture industry thesis in order to consider the ways that these industries, though distinct, function as a ‘totality’. However, within the critical political economy of communication, as in cultural studies, Adorno’s arguments serve as a point of critique and departure. The ‘cultural industries’ approach in particular draws direct lineage from the culture industry thesis but makes significant modifications to that theory. As Hesmondhalgh points out, the shift from ‘culture industry’ (singular) to ‘cultural industries’ (plural) “is revealing and surprisingly significant”: it signals how “complex the cultural industries are,” how “[t]he commodification of culture … [is] a much more ambivalent process than was allowed for by Adorno and Horkheimer’s cultural pessimism,” and how the cultural industries are a “contested … zone of continuing struggle” (Hesmondhalgh 2007, 16-17; emphasis in original). While I assert that the culture industry thesis offers an apposite framework for conceptualizing the effects of commodification on culture, the cultural industries approach lends necessary empirical and analytical precision to the study of different sectors of capitalist cultural production. As such, this body of scholarship contributes in important ways to my neo-Adornian critical framework.

In Cultural Studies and Political Economy, Robert E. Babe suggests that while Adorno’s scholarship is foundational to cultural studies (even if as a foil), it is often

overlooked altogether within the political economy of communication (Babe 2009, 18). In Babe’s account, however, the culture industry thesis laid the foundation for both fields of analysis; Marxist/neo-Marxist approaches to political economy (which he distinguishes from the non-Marxist/“institutionalist” approaches derived from Harold Innis) can be traced back to the interventions of the Frankfurt School (Babe 2009, 18- 21). “In terms of volume, if not necessarily importance,” Babe observes, “[Adorno’s] writings on aesthetics do indeed dwarf his contributions to political economy,” yet the influence of his and Horkheimer’s analysis of the links between capitalist domination and the culture industry serves as a corrective to this imbalance (Babe 2009, 18). In The Cultural Industries, Hesmondhalgh provides a somewhat different roadmap of political economy approaches, and makes a helpful distinction between the scholarship of Americans Herbert Schiller, Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, and Robert McChesney, and the European cultural industries approach inaugurated by Bernard Miège (1989), Nicholas Garnham (1990), and others (Hesmondhalgh 2007, 34-37). I direct my attention here to the latter approach, which shares an explicit connection to the culture industry thesis.

In The Capitalization of Cultural Production, Miège dedicates his foreword to a critique of the Frankfurt School conception of ‘culture industry’. According to Miège, the notion of a culture industry in the singular “misleads one into thinking that we are faced with an unified field, where the various elements function within a single process…. The same model is said to be at work, leveling out the different modes of creativity and imposing common standards” (Miège 1989, 10). The various spheres of

cultural production, in fact, are marked by industrial complexity and diversity. Miège argues that the publishing model (books, records), flow model (radio, television), and written press model (newspapers, magazines) operate according to different logics and accumulate capital through different methods (Miège 1989, 12). Miège also criticizes Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s “rigid idea of artistic creation” and the fact that their approach “is only incidentally concerned with the production process, the extension of the division of labor to the conception of artistic products, and the resulting production relationships” (Miège 1989, 10-11). Adorno does not provide a detailed political economic analysis of specific cultural industries or of cultural labour.

Miège, Garnham, and other scholars who fall within the cultural industries approach (Ryan 1991; Hesmondhalgh 1996, 2007; Toynbee 2000) all argue that the commodification of culture embodied in these industries is a far more complex and ambivalent process than is suggested by Horkheimer and Adorno. For instance, although Horkheimer and Adorno do recognize that financial risk plays a role in the choices made by media corporations, they neglect to elucidate just how unpredictable the market for cultural commodities can be. As cultural industries scholarship points out, cultural sectors face a number of challenges to profitability; cultural commodities involve high production costs (but low reproduction costs), are rarely destroyed in use (which places limits on monetization), and are particularly risky investments (Garnham 1990, 160-61; Hesmondhalgh 2007, 18-21). The cultural industries approach involves detailed critical analysis of the specific business strategies employed to mitigate or surmount such obstacles. Briefly, the cultural industries develop large catalogues of

cultural products and pursue strategies of corporate integration to minimize the overall impact of commercial failures; limit audience access through the manufacture of artificial scarcity; use the star system and genre formats to foster market predictability; and adopt loose-tight control of the creative process vis-à-vis distribution and marketing (Hesmondhalgh 2007, 22-24; see also Garnham 1990). These scholars also stress that creative cultural labourers are granted far more autonomy than is found in other industries (Hesmondhalgh 2007, passim). To a certain degree, corporations necessarily recognize the inherent tension between creativity and the dictates of commerce.

Cultural industries scholarship asserts that cultural commodities are distinct from and similar to other commodities. As Miège explains, “Cultural commodities develop according to specific conditions and modes of production; however they are also commodities like any other because they constitute in essence a new field for the expansion of exchange values, a means used by capital to maintain a given rate of accumulation” (Miège 1989, 36). This complex dual character is often misunderstood:

Either artistic creation ... is considered as being totally separate from industrialization …, or one simply refuses to acknowledge that the cultural industries possess any distinctive characteristics, and merely observes that things are now the same in this area as in others: market standardization and production concentration have gained total control. (Miège 1989, 40)

The cultural industries approach accounts for ways thatcultural commodities cannot be equated with other consumer goods. Cultural value and meaning cannot simply be read off the commodity form. The term ‘cultural industries’ loosens the ‘culture industry’ from its associations with elitism, cultural pessimism, and a particular variant of Marxist economics (Garnham 2005, 18).

For Garnham, however, “the main problem with the Frankfurt School analysis [is] not its cultural pessimism so much as the superficiality of its economic analysis” (Garnham 2005, 18). The Frankfurt School position, he asserts, offers an “insufficient[] … account of the economically contradictory nature of the process they observed and thus … see[s] the industrialization of culture as unproblematic and irresistible” (Garnham 1979, 131). The issue is not whether or not capitalist relations play a structuring and limiting role in cultural production, as Garnham agrees they do; rather, the problem lies in the fact that Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s critical framework lacks detailed political economic analysis and concrete class analysis (Garnham 1979, 131).

While cultural industries scholars distance themselves from many of the claims made by Frankfurt School scholars, I argue that these critical perspectives are not incompatible. Much as Horkheimer and Adorno contend that “[f]ilm, radio, and magazines form a system” (Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 2002, 94), Garnham observes that “the cultural sector operates as an integrated economic whole,” at least insofar as the different cultural industries compete with one another for skilled labour, advertising revenue, consumer disposable income, and consumption time (Garnham 1990, 158). In a manner comparable to Adorno’s analysis of the audience demand for difference (albeit within sameness) (Adorno [1941] 2002c, 448), Garnham stresses the importance of novelty within the market for cultural commodities (Garnham 1990, 160).

A central argument made by Garnham, which I retain in my analysis of the digitalizing music industry, emphasizes how “[i]t is cultural distribution, not cultural

production, that is the key locus of power and profit…. The cultural process is as much, if not more, about creating audiences or publics as it is about producing cultural artefacts and performances” (Garnham 1990, 161-62; emphasis in original). Notably, ‘creating audiences’ is actually the work of marketing and not distribution per se. Marketing and distribution continue to dictate profitability inside the contemporary music industry, as we shall see.

3.6

Conclusion

The culture industry thesis offers a convincing theoretical framework for conceptualizing the constraints that commodification necessarily places on culture; as properties used to generate profits, varied cultural texts and practices are subsumed under the common denominator of exchange. However, I agree with key criticisms offered by scholarship within cultural studies and the political economy of communication; cultural commodities are more complex, contradictory, and meaningful than the culture industry thesis suggests, and the degree to which particular cultural commodities will resonate with audiences and, hence, become profitable remains unpredictable. Because the culture industry system certainly is not as seamless as Adorno assumes, the cultural industries approach serves as an important and necessary complement to any effective reformulation of the culture industry thesis. By bringing together these two approaches in this chapter, I began to build the critical foundation of my neo-Adornian framework – a process that culminates in Chapter 6, where I combine David Harvey’s (1990, 2005, 2006, 2010) scholarship on neoliberal and post-Fordist processes of capital accumulation with Adorno’s critique of commodification.

Inside the music industry, in a manner consistent with Adorno’s analysis, the primacy of marketability influences which recording artists are signed by record companies and which material is recorded, released, and promoted. In Chapter 4, I draw on the cultural industries approach in order to provide an in-depth examination and comparison of specific commercial pressures and industrial dynamics characteristic of the ‘old’ and the digitalizing music industries. Turning to the use of popular music by consumer brands and media properties, Chapter 5 documents and analyzes the intensifying relationship between recording artists and brands. In so doing, it provides empirical support for the cogency of neo-Adornian critique and bridges concerns regarding popular music’s commodity form introduced in Chapter 3 and 4 to Chapter 6, where I advance my argument that the proliferation of promotional ubiquitous musics under post-Fordism reflects the triumph of the means-ends rationality so definitively delineated by Adorno. The merger between popular music and advertising, which was only in its infancy when Horkheimer and Adorno developed their critical analysis, has been fully realized in recent years, largely as a result of the digitalizing music industry’s changing marketing and monetization strategies and brands’ increasing interest in the promotional value of recording artists and popular music. Popular music’s intensifying merger with advertising, television, and film under the emergent music branding paradigm suggests that, now more than ever, the “individual branches are similar in structure or at least fit into each other, ordering themselves into a system almost without a gap” (Adorno [1967] 2001b, 98).

4

THE DIGITALIZING MUSIC INDUSTRY: ‘CRISIS’