Culture Industry

During today's lesson we became X-Factor Judges to help us understand how to sell an artist.

(Production of Culture/ Culture of Production - Paul Du Gay, 1997)

As Cheryl Cole my group had decided that we wanted a unique sellable young male artist with a sob story. 

We watched some audition tapes and decided what we would say to the auditionee's face and what would be the plan. The plan for most of the auditionee's was to change their look and target them to a specific audience. 

Introduce Adorno + Horkeimer's (Culture Industry)

There are three stages of this theory:

• Standardization
• Pseudo Individuality
• Capitalism

AN ARTIST IS A COMMODITY

The way cultural items are produced is the same to how other industries mass manufacture consumer goods. As a company might make a car, everything is lined up and then things are changed. So a car would get the engine, then the body and so on and the music artist would get a new body, new clothes, new hairstyle, make up etc. Music has been corrupted by productions and administrative regin of industrial capitalism. The X-Factor has corrupted us as an audience as it produces the same thing the create mass audience taste.

Eventually, we become numb to everything in the music industry and like whatever is churned out. Everything is set in place to make money.

The Celebrity Making Machine stresses the repetitive and routine character of cultural production.

Baudrillard said 'Nothing is original, everything is the same.'

Music is written so it is standardized and becomes catchy - so it gets stuck in the audience's head. Songs are based around repetitive sequences and recurring refrains. The songs imprint and provoke sales.

Pseudo Individuality: Makes claim to originality, but only contains superficial differences.

An example of an artist that doesn't fit the standard (which was then rejected by the mass audience as we all have the same taste) is Maverick Sabre.

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