Audience taste is manufactured by the industry, not the reverse.

Evidence

The attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favors the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it. If one branch of art follows the same formula as one with a very different medium and content; if the dramatic intrigue of broadcast soap operas becomes no more than useful material for showing how to master technical problems at both ends of the scale of musical experience—real jazz or a cheap imitation; or if a movement from a Beethoven symphony is crudely “adapted” for a film sound-track in the same way as a Tolstoy novel is garbled in a film script: then the claim that this is done to satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than hot air. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 94

Categorization

• XREF: The Beethoven-symphony-to-film-soundtrack example prefigures the recurring theme in the reader’s soundscape books of art degraded by industrial reproduction. — connects to: Audiences bring their own cultures to consumption, so media effects are never automatic — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 122; Media effects depend on active negotiation with audiences’ existing cultures, not mere transmission.; The culture industry does not fully determine what consumers think and feel. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 282 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• The culture industry is production from above, not culture arising from the masses #corroborates (0.95) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 134
• The culture industry does not fully determine what consumers think and feel. #contradicts (0.90) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 282
• Media effects depend on active negotiation with audiences’ existing cultures, not mere transmission. #complicates (0.85)
• Mass consumers are calculated objects, not the subjects, of culture production #corroborates (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 138
• Audiences bring their own cultures to consumption, so media effects are never automatic #complicates (0.82) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 122
• Mass culture makes audiences enact their own manipulation. #expands (0.82)
• The culture industry’s products prescribe reactions through signals to forbid reflection #expands (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 107
• Communication distortion stems from asymmetric positions between producers and audiences. #expands (0.78)
• Poptimism legitimized marketing and spectacle as cultural production itself. #exemplifies (0.72) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 140