Under standardized musical production, liking a piece reduces to recognizing it.

Evidence

If one seeks to find out who ‘likes’ a commercial piece, one cannot avoid the suspicion that liking and disliking are inappropriate to the situation, even if the person questioned clothes his reactions in those words. The familiarity of the piece is a surrogate for the quality ascribed to it. To like it is almost the same thing as to recognize it. An approach in terms of value judgements has become a fiction for the person who finds himself hemmed in by standardized musical goods. He can neither escape impotence nor decide between the offerings where everything is so completely identical that preference in fact depends merely on biographical details or on the situation in which things are heard. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 68

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the key diagnostic: in administered culture, familiarity substitutes for quality and preference collapses into biographical accident.
• SEED: Could test this on modern streaming: ‘algorithmic familiarity’ — does recommendation-engine recognition now stand in for musical liking in exactly this way?
• XREF: connects to: Popular music hits must be identical to rivals yet individually memorable to sell — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1018