But Adorno’s critique is not limited to entertainment or popular music, but extends to what some term classical or serious music. Just think of the dominant way people consume music today: commercial radio stations are entirely funded by advertising. Popular and classical musical festivals are exercises in commercial sponsorship and branding. YouTube is for many a primary source for listening to and watching music. It interlaces music with advertisements. Spotify presents a couple of minutes advertisements to all those listeners who are not premium subscribers. Adorno felt that culture becomes debased when it is connected to commerce and advertisements. Out of his analysis of music and culture speaks the desire for a world of culture beyond the commodity form and beyond advertisement.
3.2.6. Adorno and Alternative Media
Adorno argues for music and culture as non-identity, as something that is functionless and is consumed independently of the profit logic of corporations. ‘Profit puts the functionless into its service and thereby degrades it into senselessness and unrelatedness’ (Adorno 1973a, 222). Adorno was a radical anti-capitalist, who was opposed to the capitalist form of music and culture. He would not oppose YouTube, where in fact one can not just watch music videos and other films, but also listen to lectures by Adorno. But he would oppose the commodity character of users’ data on this platform, i.e. the constant feature of advertisements that prohibit the uninterrupted engagement with culture. Thinking Adorno to the end means that we have to talk about and struggle for non-commercial, alternative, critical media.
Adorno’s critique of the culture industry is a radical critique of the commodity form. ‘From a social perspective, present-day musical activity, production and consumption can be divided drastically into that which unconditionally recognises its commodity character and, refusing any dialectic intervention, orients itself according to the demands of the market and that which in principle does not accept the demands of the market’ (Adorno 1932, 395). Adorno’s hatred of the commodity form of the media and culture can be read as an appeal for the creation and sustenance of non-commercial, non-profit media and culture, so-called ‘alternative media and alternative culture’ that are organised outside of corporate monopolies and challenge the ‘mainstream’.
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Critical Theory of Communication