The culture industry is standardized products and rationalized distribution, not industrial production

Evidence

Thus, the expression ‘industry’ is not to be taken too literally. It refers to the standardization of the thing itself - such as that of the Western, familiar to every movie-goer - and to the rationalization of distribution techniques, but not strictly to the production process. … Each product affects an individual air; individuality itself serves to reinforce ideology, in so far as the illusion is conjured up that the completely reified and mediated is a sanctuary from immediacy and life. … It is industrial more in a sociological sense, in the incorporation of industrial forms of organization even when nothing is manufactured - as in the rationalization of office work -rather than in the sense of anything really and actually produced by technological rationality. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 137

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precise technical definition separating standardization/rationalization of distribution from actual production-process industrialization — a subtlety essential to applying the term correctly.
• DEEPTHINKING: The pseudo-individuation claim — that surface individuality is precisely the ideological instrument — is the hardest and most counterintuitive component of the whole framework.