Theodor Adorno and the Non-Identicality of Popular Music. Section 1         

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    Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) vilified popular musics, specifically jazz, as the regressive, product of the relations of production within a mass culture produced by state capitalism.  Adorno’s approach inextricably linked production and content, both in the making and the decimating music within a specific system of economy, namely with the end of liberal capitalism and the beginning of technologically affected, mass culture and production.  Adorno, in his articles “On Popular Music,” “Jazz—The Perennial Fashion,” and “The Fetish Character of Music and Regression of Listening[1],” claimed that all popular musics are identical, in that they are all the pseudo-differentiated products of the capitalist system of production.   Adorno’s claim of identicality in popular music is often rejected by those who have since studied popular music such as Theodore Gracyk and Richard Middleton.  These authors emphasize the contextualization of musics rather than the homogenous representation of all popular music presented by Adorno.  I seek to explore these scholars’ work on music, along with Adorno’s, in order to argue for non-identicality in popular music from a different perspective.  In asserting that popular music is non-identical, contra Adorno’s specific claims, I will explore the possibility of music and artists seeking entrance from outside of the “culture industry” via a selection of “how-to” books.  Using a discussion of Adorno and Georg Lukacs, I will point to an interpretation of domination that can be avoided by unveiling the truth behind the commodity form. The “how-to” provides examples of how musicians outside the music industry seek to gain entrance into the commodity form and use knowledge as a key to success. 

    By exploring these books textually, I seek to “read against the grain” of the “how-to” book, which could easily be interpreted to support the domination of the culture industry. The how-to book presents a ridgid, totalizing structure to which artists must conform. However, I seek to use the “how-to” books as a point of departure towards an argument for the non-identicality of popular music that includes (not rescues) Adorno, in both his theory of popular music and his later work on mass culture and dialectics.  In this way, this paper will add to understandings of Adorno’s impact on recent Western music study and the possibilities of using his insights in further discussion of technique and social mediation.

    Adorno's claims are important to address because Adorno stems from a tradition of critical social theory seeking to explore the structures underpinning modern life.  Adorno’s co-authored text, The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, bring together myth and science in an attempt to ground fascism and the commercialization of culture into a framework of political economy. The result is the concept of the “culture industry,” which is widely used in discussions of music and commodity[2]. I also think it is important not to address Adorno’s claims empirically as is done by some of his critics.  Theodore Gracyk relies on examples of socially mediated music to show that music is not identical but rather generically understood. However, Adorno is critiquing the structure of popular music, not the product.  All popular music is identical, because for Adorno, everything that is produced in the culture industry comes from the same system of production and therefore is fundamentally and structurally the same.

The critiques offered by Richard Middleton and Theodore Gracyk are empirical, that is, they seek to find counter examples for Adorno’s claims, and in many ways they are successful.  However, what is missing is an interpretation of structure.  For Adorno, it is the particulars of capitalism that create domination and hence it is the particulars of the capitalist music industry that cause identicality. If the particulars of capitalist structure make music identical, then those same particulars within the structure must be used to it might be non-identical.  In order to answer Adorno, a critique must come not from social mediation, reception or from specific bands but from the structure, the locus of Adorno’s own argument.  Looking at how-to books as examples of (mediated) presentation of the structure—from within the structure, will allow this paper to add to a critique of Adorno in such a way that addresses the heart of Adorno’s problem with popular music—capitalism.  Monoply or state capitalism was considered by the Adorno and his contemporaries at the Frankfurt school to have replaced 19^th century liberal capitalism.  The revolutions of the early 20^th century, in their eyes, failed to offer a release from domination and suffering in human life.  Rather, centralized control of resources and products resulted in limited choices for individuals. 

Examining the music industry as a model that shows music outside the structure attempting to join it, suggests the possibility of non-identical music outside the domination of the culture industry.  Theoretically, showing the possibility of popular music outside the culture industry is enough, because for Adorno, the lack of possibility, the non-existence of the particular outside of domination is what makes the culture industry and thus, popular music dangerous.

Briefly introducing Adorno, I will pursue his characterization of identicality through his various discussions of popular music. In comparison to the possibilities of release from a system of domination suggested by Lukacs, I will suggest that the non-identical may present itself through the recognition and rejection of dominating processes within the music industry. Then, I will present a few of Adorno’s critics within popular music studies and characterize the similarities in their understanding of Adorno.  Finally, I will visit the subject of the “how-to” texts describing their form and content with a key emphasis on the assumptions the texts make and the descriptions they provide of the music industry.  Emphasizing two key points within the texts, I will discuss the ways in which the music industry within the texts suggests a structure where music comes from the outside, existing prior to the structure, but is superficially assimilated.  The result is original musics whose production is similar but whose content is not.   

Adorno was in contact with and wrote extensively on music throughout his life.  He studied “new music” for a time in the mid 1920’s in Vienna under Alan Berg. While there (and later) Adorno supported Shoenberg’s modern music, specifically his early work emphasizing music’s cognitive rather than expressive value.[3] On popular music, Adorno wrote mainly about jazz. He indicted popular music generally, as regressive, banal, and repetitive.  Compared to the avant-garde project of Shoenberg, jazz was false,  without originality, and failed to provide social critique.  For Adorno, the top hits coming from the Big Band era were nothing more than variations on the same song, a sham of pseudo-individualization, resulting in regressive, dominating forms of listening.  At fault in the weakness of popular music was the process of mass production, which ruined any possibility of expressing something new or different.  “For the masses” meant popularity and in order to appeal broadly, the popular music industry constructed a vast and totalizing system of music production and decimation using simple, accessible formulas and plenty of repetition.

            Mass production is a means of creating and decimating music that arose around the turn of the century and continued to grow and establish dominance among music production types. Mass production involves the manufacture and marketing of a variety of music related goods, including recorded music, written score, and performances.  Additionally, for Adorno mass production is also the process by which popular music is produced.  That is, not only the manufacture but also the creation of content is on a large scale and targeted to the mass consumer.  Popular music, as it is seen today, is the result of a limited number of large corporations, supported by a larger number of “independent” companies that produce music and artists with the goal of reaching a large if not infinite number of listeners.  For Adorno, mass-produced music is made to be popular, recognizable and novel.  This intention in the creation of music is shared by all popular musics regardless of genre.  

In Adorno, we see an explicit connection between the production of music, the music industry and its conforming character. For Adorno, “competition on the culture market has proved the effectiveness of a number of techniques” that are “sorted out and kaleidoscopically mixed into ever new combinations.[4]” These combinations provide the basis for a false difference in the music that Adorno calls pseudo-individualization.

Pseudo-individualized products appear to be different on the surface but in fact are identical products that are only superficially different.  This is done in order to lead consumers to believe that the products they choose are different from each other.  For example, soaps are often made from the same set of ingredients.  However, soap manufacturers add smells, decorative, packaging and advertising to claim that one soap is more desirable than their competitors’.   Adorno would say that all of the soaps were the same, identical, but that the efforts by the manufacturer to differentiate cause soaps to appear different.

Adorno believes this process characterizes popular music.  He asserts that all popular musics are identical, but that they are packaged differently to appeal to the needs of the consumer.  In order for this ploy of producing identical, yet differentiated music to work, the culture industry must actively operate on the consumer.  Adorno believes this is done through monopoly, plugging and regressive listening.

The monopoly of the music industry is one where all mass-produced, popular musics are made by an oligarchy of corporations who control not only music production but also its creative content, retail and radio play.  The music industry is a monopoly because according to Adorno there were no alternatives, no other types of popular music.

Plugging, or the constant repetition of songs to make them popular, serves to standardize tastes by excluding non-identical music from listeners.  This means that the music industry has control of the music produced and hence what people hear, this control allows the industry to manipulate listeners into accepting the industry’s identical products.  If a song or song structure is repeated often enough it will be recognized.  More repetition results in the transformation of recognition to acceptance.  In this scenario, familiarity is equitable to approval and plugging, of name bands, songs, and personalities dictate the tastes of the consumer.  The process of recognition is continued in every song because they all follow a general pattern.  The listener is subsumed into a system where structures and deviations are pre-digested, or intentionally presented in a way designed for intelligibility and recognition. 

Taking Adorno’s assertion of the false difference in popular music styles, or genres at face value, allows for the description of a systematic machine where production and consumption occur on the same levels as in any industry under capitalism.  Thus, production and distribution of products of the same type, yet different styles to a public who accepts constructed differences between genres as real, thus forming a hegemonic representation of new music as creative and unique. This hegemony is made to rob the public of their individuality and render them passive, is written and produced using an arsenal of “proven” methods. “Jazz, which knows what it is doing when it allies itself with technique, collaborates in the ‘technological veil’ through its rigorously repetitive though objectless cultural ritual.[5]”  The use of technology to mask the subsumption of individuals leads to negative social affects.  Adorno sees the worst case scenario as one where industry monopolies develop music psychologically programmed for mass appeal that provide the perception of freedom within a totally, sometimes violently, unfree society.

The problem with standardization and hence popular music is that listening is manipulated in what Adorno calls a, “system of response mechanisms wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society.[6]”  This means that in listening to standardized music, listeners are robbed of spontaneity and prodded into a conditioned reflex.  This is because listeners understand popular music through patterns that are presented to them by industry through a process of repetition and subsumption. The listener is robbed of the ability to choose between likes and dislikes because “value judgments have become a fiction for the person who finds himself hemmed in by standardized musical goods.[7]”

Recognition, subsumption and distraction for the listener lead to obedience and for Adorno, obedience is a prelude to the horrific.  The disconnection in popular music between the part and the whole means that just as no piece of jazz can have a history, its parts moved at will within the structure, “so the perennial fashion becomes the likeness of a planned congealed society, not so different from the nightmare vision of Huxley’s Brave New World.[8]” Music than operates as merely another tool, a voice, for capitalist oppression and domination.

The terror of popular music is the result regressive listening.  The power of the universal over the particular eventually causes conformity in the particular; a process Adorno calls ‘regression.’  The regression of the individual and in the case of music of the listener, means that resistance to the structure is not possible.  Terror results when, individuals find themselves, “capitulating before the superior power of the advertised stuff and purchase spiritual peace by making the imposed goods literally its own thing.[9]”  That is, upon realizing the ubiquitous nature of monopolistic production, listeners are made uneasy, a feeling which they overcome by aligning themselves with the goals of the monopoly.  This view is restated in Negative Dialectics, in a discussion of how the individual is involved in its own subjection under the dominance of the universal.  When the universal exerts its pressure on the particular, the individual adapts, by force, in order to survive.[10]  In the case of music, the choices offered by popular music are identical yet the listener constructs false differences in order to cope with the pressure of the universal.

Adorno believes that this process masks the truth of authoritarian control (similar to that which he experienced under Nazi rule in Germany) making popular music “in the service of irrational totalitarian control.[11]”  The result is terrified music fans that use jazz ritually to be “accepted into a community of unfree equals.[12]”  Perceiving that they are a part of a legitimately free community, they fail to recognize the controls placed on them.  Social controls come from the music itself as “jazz sets up schemes of social behavior to which people must in any case conform.[13]”  By conforming to the demands of the music, whilst believing the music makes them free, the people serve to both perpetuate control as well as involve themselves in the system that subsumes them.  Thus, individuals become agents of their own domination, leading to a social totality Adorno finds inescapable.

            The dismal situation that the listener thus finds herself in is one of passive acceptance of identical product, which consequently causes a liquidation of subjectivity.  The consumer becomes a quantifiable object of manipulation rather than a qualitative subject of creation.   The continuous activity of the individual is the object; the alienated and objectified quantified worker that is under domination.  This worker is “forced into becoming the object of the process by which he is turned into a commodity and reduced to mere quantity.[14]”  Adorno might extend this claim to music that he believes is commodified and quantified into identical, marketable units.

To begin a critique of Adorno, I will 1^st look within critvcal theory to Georg Lukacs.  Lukacs agrees with the construction of the individual as object. In his study of reification, History and Class Consciousness, Lukas attempts to provide the possibility of overcoming this dilemma of domination.  Dealing specifically with concepts of the bourgeois and proletariat, his argument outlines the role the proletariat class will play in shaping history once it realizes its ability to shape it.   Within this discussion we find a starting point within critical theory for making claims as to the non-identicality of music and within capitalism in general.

The central focus of Lukacs’ work is to achieve a union between Marxist theory and praxis to overcome reification in capitalist society through a dialectical understanding of history by the proletariat as an integrated totality.  In order for such a revolutionary event to occur, the proletariat must ultimately become conscious of itself as a class, of the capitalist society in which it currently exists, and its own relation to history.  History itself and capitalist ideology provide the impetus for the emergence of such a conscious proletariat, which will in time see itself as both the subject and object of history.

According to Lukacs, reification in capitalist structure produces an extreme form of alienation.  It is an objectification and “transformation into a ‘thing’ of what originally does not have the mode of being a thing.[15]”   Capitalism ignores what is essentially a relation among people and produces an outside system of ‘natural’ laws which appears closed and rational but which ignores and dismisses a totalizing view. Adorno seems to adopt such a view about popular music.  Where Lukacs attempts to find a remedy in the reified individual, I will find one for music. Under capitalist ideology and ‘natural’ law, the world becomes fatalistic, neutral, and ahistorical, where factual information is value free.  Like Marx’s commodity fetishism, reification fragmentizes the individual and makes each part a replaceable and interchangeable commodity.  People become formal parts and their behavior (and in turn control or exploitation of it) becomes an abstract calculation dissociated from anything individual or personal.  The capitalist cleavage between subject and object can only be overcome by the proletariat, the revolutionary vehicle, though praxis, “the concrete union of thought and reality.[16]”

The proletariat is the subject of history, the actor and knower, and the object of history, about which there is knowledge and towards which there is action.  Truth can be understood as the unfolding of the realization of the union between theory and practice, or praxis.  It is the totality of all social relations seen as a whole by the proletariat.  Truth in this manner is not concrete and static (thus reified), but the process of the dialectic itself, the understanding and action at once, again praxis.  Reality then is a social process integrated with individuals (as subject-object) though praxis and not a dissociated abstract world to which people relate solely as subjects.

For Lukacs there is "a dialectic between the social existence of the worker and the forms of his consciousness,[17]" that exists allowing the worker to realize his position with the system.  "In the commodity the worker recognizes himself and his own relations with capitol,[18]" as well as the music industry.   Through the self-consciousness of the proletariat comes the knowledge that society is founded on exchange and production of commodities.  One of those commodities is the workers' labor or her music.  Upon realizing this, the worker can use this knowledge to reveal, "beneath the cloak of the thing later relation between men, that but beneath the quantifying cross there was a qualitative, living core.[19]" 

“For the proletariat to become aware of that dialectical nature of its existence is a matter of life and death, whereas the bourgeois uses an abstract categories of reflection, such as quantity and infinite regression, to conceal the dialectical structure of the historical process in daily life only to be confronted by an mediated catastrophes when the pattern is reversed.[20]"  When structures are confronted by catastrophe, that is the realization of domination by the proletariat, a fissure opens. For example, by realizing the processes of domination attempted by the culture industry, musicians are able to resist and produce non-identical music.  In opposition, according to Lukacs there is a potential that a proletarian artist could realize his or her relationship with the commodity form and adopt this knowledge to make non-identical music within the system. Understanding that the artists and the consumers are in real personal relation, not just of exchange.  Musicians and consumers must come to realize that they are the engines of the music industry.  That is not to say that the music industry as a system can be overcome, but that it can be put to other uses, non-oppressive ones. Artists can see the structure and manipulate it to reveal the truth that is a social mediation.  Non-identical music within the structure is music that is coming to itself as a self-conscious part of the structure.  Just as the proletariat becomes the subject and object of history it also becomes the subject and object of popular culture.

If the public or the artists were never to become aware of the ubiquity of control music industry product, domination could continue.  At the point, however, that music is seen as an agent of domination, a point of power that can be alternatively used in a liberating way, and thus is a cause for resistance, sometimes in the form of music, the proletariat has the opportunity to take control of popular music, while the remains a capitalist institution.  By demanding authentic music products and being skeptical of pseudo-differentiation, the public has the ability to ensure its participation in a non-regressive music culture. 

How can we show an instance of artists aware of the nature of commodity in music while maintaining creative control over their music? By acknowledging both the business and creative aspects of the music industry, the how-to book speaks to the aspiring musicians outside the music industry warning them of obstacles they face and assuring musicians that entrance and success in the music industry is possible.

The how-to text addresses domination in the music industry directly in that it advises how to avoid it.  By packaging demo tapes and understanding procedures, any kind of music has the ability to become successful.  The how-to text explicitly draws delineation between the aspiring artist outside the industry and the insider viewpoint.

By recognizing the artists positioned outside the music industry, the how-to book presents the music business as a penetrable structure, not a totalizing monopoly.  The keys to access the structure, according to the texts, are in establishing contacts and developing a plan.  Thus, while was once the impregnable music industry thus becomes a network of persons of socialization and open to systematic action.  The how-to books expressly reveal not only the specific relationships in the music business, for example between an artist and a musical where, but also the hierarchal and structure relationships that control access to resources and ultimately success.  Thus, Lukacs' example of realization of the truth behind commodities can be applied to the how-to book, which for the aspiring artist, attempts to reveal the true social relations that control the music industry.

Adorno’s claims as to identicality of popular music are answered by pointing out that the monopoly of the music industry has weakened and its domination of the artist has been unveiled. The reified surface of the music industry is revealed in the how-to book because it, even as itself a commodity, market and understanding of the true nature of the music industry.

Adorno argues in his treatment of the “culture industry” that there is a monopoly of those who make and produce music to sell to a passive audience resulting in a direct relationship between production and reception.  The consumer, in making discriminating choices, is usurped by the identicality of the music products offered.  The monopoly of the music industry provides pseudo-individuation through genre distinctions, which are in fact variations on a theme, identical. By acknowledging the powerful role music industry conglomerate have in producing music and that popular musics are potentially identical under a system of domination, the proletarian can resist pseudo individualization by rejecting identical products.  Additionally, by offering alternatives to the culture industry in the form of independent labels and artists, regression as a result of usurping choice can be avoided.

Though the culture industry attempts to constrain popular music into a single marketable structure, the activity of music makes this impossible.  It is to the financial benefit of record companies to establish a system of direct domination of popular taste, however, it is not possible to achieve a total domination because music is made by the proletariat and has the potential to go beyond the structure.

This view of the music industry is supported by sociologist Keith Negus who asserts a reciprocal relationship between the industry and its consumers.  He notes that music producers have a variety of approaches in selecting and distributing music they feel will be popular, but ultimately whether not a given song or artist will succeed is never guaranteed.  Thus, music producers are locked in a relationship with the public rather than a direct domination.  The consumer has a variety of music to choose from  independent and corporate, national, international, and local sources.  Rather than a monopoly, the music industry faces fierce competition within music as well as with other entertainment genres. 

                The inability of the music industry to determine which musics will be popular forces the music industry to search out music rather than control it.  The rise of independent labels with a variety of economic and political platforms has shown that a variety of options are available to music consumers.  Previously, the music industry took on much of the responsibility of artist development, but in recent, more competitive times record labels are increasingly searching out established artists.  They are less creatively influential and serve more of an international and national distributive function.              The changing role of the one monopolistic music conglomerates leads to a different interpretation of the structure of the music industry than Adorno’s 1930’s version..

That the music industry is in truth a structure of social relations lends to an interpretation of popular music grounded in social mediation.  Those who study popular music have presented a variety of responses to Adorno claims on the ground that the social content of the door as critique has changed and that the music industry as it is today allows for Non-identical music.

Negus’s view provides little explination of the continued uniformity of music tastes and the proliferation of the music of identicality.  Adorno cannot be completely abandoned in favor of a solely competitive, social mediation model, which provides no groundwork for music critique and no room for domination within the music industry.  Even though music producers and consumers are in communication, their relationship is in tension, with producers attempting to profit from consumers. In addressing Adorno, it is important to include the capitalist model of social relations in order to better surmise the position of the music industry in terms of profit, domination and exchange.

The how-to text offers an awareness of the need for profit and includes it in a model of creative music making.  Both the traditional terms of domination and new social approaches to music can flexibly exist.  Popular music studies has provided a response to Adorno’s allegations, focusing on refuting Adorno by example and introducing social mediations.

Richard Middleton specifically addresses Adorno in his book Studying Popular Music.  He bases his critique on the three issues that that most concern Adorno, musical production, musical form and musical reception.  Adorno asserts that musical production is the result of mass production in capitalism, where the popular music form is standardized and in its reception is instrumentalized in the service of the ruling class.

            Middleton’s problems with Adorno come when he turns empirical evidence into totalizing theory; “tendential strategy is turned into achieved fact.[21]” According to Middleton, Adorno overgeneralized based on one historical moment, 1930’s Germany and overstates the homogeneity of components making up the ruling structure and underplays class struggle and the resistance that can develop from domination.  Middleton means that even in the apparently ubiquitous culture industry of the 1930’s and 40’s, there was a dissonance between industry, groups, individuals in institutions, and the completeness of the monopoly and control of radio. As well, the industry was undermined by the rise of independent recording.  In short, Adorno’s theory does not account for the possibility of conflict; artistic complication of the industry machine.  Middleton asks, “is it reasonable to account for the advent of jazz, rock n roll, beat and punk in terms of pseudo-individuation within an underlying process of simple reproduction?[22]”  Adorno’s theory does not account for the innovation-assimilation cycle present in the Anglo-American music industry or the conflicts between independent and major labels.  According to Middleton whereas the industry may have seemed looming at the end of the 1930’s, the development of new music trends, or quite simply the popularalization of music that is not ‘jazz’ and is composed in a comparable, but different way to both serious music and swing.[23]

Basically, Middleton’s critique of Adorno is to say that though Adorno’s argument has ‘force,’ it takes example as totality while being based on a class-centric notion of music.  He supports his claims by going through Adorno piece by piece and finding counterexamples that conflict with the theory.   His most sympathetic treatment of Adorno stems from this contextualization.  From Adorno’s Austro-German perspective, Tin Pan Alley Songs are all similar, and beneath the looming shadow of Fascism and the events of the 1930’s, negative social effects of mass production do seem inevitable.  However, Middleton notes that this historical period has passed and after ‘mass culture’ gave way to ‘pop culture’ and post-modern fragments replaced modernist totalities, the flaws in Adorno’s theory are revealed.

This however is not a complete reversal of Adorno as Negus appears to be.  Middle allows for the continuous influence of the music industry, in domination and oppression and simply undermines the absolute character of the Adorno’s work.  Music is not as homogenous as Adorno demands, but it is also not as free from manipulation as Negus seems to suggest.

            The critique of Adorno’s homologous characterization of popular music is echoed by Theodore Gracyk, who more strongly questioned Adorno’s subsumption of popular music under the term jazz.  In his book Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, Theodore Gracyk addresses Adorno as a critic of popular music.   Gracyk characterizes Adorno's comments as on music “an interdisciplinary cultural critique steeped in Hegel and Marx and tempered by firsthand experience of Nazi totalitarianism.[24]”  He uses Adorno’s critique of jazz as a blueprint for responding to rock’s aesthetic legitimacy.  Adorno also provides a legacy of high vs. low; comparing music made for artistic expression against music made for commercial entertainment.  Gracyk argues that personal expression arises from an artists’ successful use of the shared vocabulary of a music genre.  He suggests that a mediation exists between the dichotomy of art and market as mutually exclusive.

In arguing that music is not identical, Gracyk uses the concept of a “signature sound” with which to differentiate bands. A signature sound is developed by successful bands to set them apart for the purpose of commercial as well as artistic gains. In popular music, Gracyk assets, there is an aesthetic as well as commercial code for success. Gracyk offers the signature sound as an element within the structure that allows for resistance and difference.  The particularity of the signature sound comes through the individuals involved.  A given group crafts a specific sound and is dependant on the particularity of social relation within its membership for its sound.   

In the mass market place financial and artistic successes are determined not by essential characteristics or industrial monopoly but by the interactions of socially constructed actors, and public response.  Whether or not these actors make good or bad, expressive or synthetic music is irrelevant, because neither could occur within the structure alone.

Musicians, producers, and distributors are each involved in music coming to being, both as an artistic and entrepreneurial enterprise.  Thus, the combination of composition and production serves to blur lines of the separation between music for the masses and all music, since the majority of music is produced in a similar form—mass production. Popular music is involved in its production; that is, the techniques used in the studio to produce music are a vital part of music’s production.

Popular musics are grounded in social mediations; music is a part of a community, it is not essential.  Contextually and historically, the idioms for understanding music change are replaced by new, evolved idioms.  Within these new sounds, the embellishments that Adorno believes to be the crucial differentiating aspect in popular music eventually become outdated.  Music is mediated by social and political activity; by the involvement of many different people in production and niche markets of listeners.

The duality of the character of popular musics, aesthetic and commercial) supports Middleton’s previous claims. Adorno focused on the commercial to the total occlusion of the aesthetic.  By combining the critique of Gracyk and Middleton, we can come to see a music industry caught in a tension between  two forces; aesthetic and commercial.

Adorno's main claim as to the music industry provides a monopoly of music sources that results in regressive, simplistic, and ever-same music.  Adorno’s critics comment not only on judgments of popular music but also on his emphasis on immanent critique.  The value of music is not only to be found in the music, but also in the contingent social relations, mediations and changing interpretations surrounding yet.  For both Gracyk and Middleton, the meaning of music is to be found in multiple locations; along intersections of social categories as well as in the changing historical understandings of music and its reception and impact.  They each offer a multifaceted explanation of the ways in which popular music resists the “culture industry” and the production of identical products based on mass appeal by pointing to exceptions, differences and discrepancies between music production and reception. 

Critiques of Adorno often focus on counterexamples or situation within the music industry that allow for non-identical music.  That is, by finding cracks, or openings in the monolithic culture industry, difference is able to exist.  Independent recording companies are a simple answer to Adorno’s allegation. Although not prominent in the music Adorno critiques, they existed, and today though the mass-market music industry has swelled in size so has the proliferation and influence of independent companies.

Even artists within the culture industry are non-identical, in the production and sometimes popularity of songs they do not fit or explicitly reject industry codifications, punk and progressive rock both eschewed standards in song length and public taste and received release, airplay, and acclaim.

The study of popular music has often begun with a justification of the merits of studying popular music.  As a cultural form, popular music was ignored as a topic of study in favor of more traditional music forms.  If popular music was addressed it was in terms of its folk or native elements.  Thus popular music was separated from other more serious musics as a vulgar, less-aesthetic music form.  Since all popular musics by their very category share accessibility and likeability, by being popular, musics have a wide audience, the study of popular music has primarily been social.

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