Adorno & Horkheimer Theory

• A&H adopted the term culture industry to argue that the way in which cultural items were produced was analgous to how other industries manufactured vast quantities of consumer goods.
• A&H argued that the cultural industry exhibited an assembly-line character which could be observed in the synthetics, planned method of turning out its products.
• A&H linked the idea of the culture industry to a model of mass culture in which cultural productions had become a routine; standard repetitive operation that produced understanding cultural commodities which in turn resulted in a type of consumption that was also standard, distracted & passive.
• A&H's view of cultural production has, with some justification, often been portrayed as the pessimistic lament of cultural elitists who were dismayed at what they perceived to be the homogeneity and vulgarity of 'mass' taste, and who were concerned that the potential for artistic creativity in music, literature & painting had been co-opted & corrupted by the production methods & administrative regimes of industrial capitalism.
• The capitalist corporation seems to enjoy an almost omnipotent form of domination & both the consumers & the creative artists vs our separate form but are directly connected to this system of production.
• A&H argued that CI operated in some way as either manufacturing industries.
• A&H argued that all products produced by the culture industry exhibited standardised features.
• A noted that songs which became successful over time were often referred to as standards, a category that clearly drew attention to their formulaic character from the plan to the details, songs were based around repetitive sequences and frequently recurring refrains. This was done for quite calculculated commercial reasons, so that the song would imprint itself on the mind of the listener and then provoke a purchase. For Adorno, the production of bit songs had become a mechanical and manipulative operation motivated purely by commercial gain.
• A&H were also critical of what they referrred to as pseudo individuality. By this they meant the way that the culture industry assembled products that made claims to originality but which when examined more critically exhibited little more than superficial differences.
• A&H thus present us with a powerful argument about what happens to culture when it is subject to the structural control and organisation of industrial capitalist production: it becomes merely a standardised, formulaic and representitive element  of mass culture. It has no aesthetic value whatsoever and leads to a very specific type of consumption that is passive, obedient and easily manipulated for the purpose of propaganda of advertising.