Culture industries are dominated by a few big corporations that prefer to keep flogging old stories instead of taking a risk on something new. Creative workers can still produce fresh ideas, but they’re snuffed out before they get a chance to breathe.
The fact these business types call it a “culture industry” is all you need to know.
People used to make up songs just for the fun of it and that was the majority of songs people knew. Now most songs you know are made specifically to generate money. Hell, kids sing jingles.
The term “culture industry” was coined by Horkheimer and Adorno, who were actually Marxist critics, so the origin of the term is pejorative, but the business types did adopt it.
Til
I made up a song while putzing around the house this weekend. Sadly, I can’t imagine platforms willing to host a folk hero song about St Luigi and a sorely-needed revolution…
try Bandlab, I might be able to whip up a guitar something to go along. I’m @hadriscus
Feels like culture meth. Too easy to hear the greatest musicians, see the best movies, play the best games. Our ability to enjoy “real” things is diminished and the only way to consistently get our fix is via culture industries.
The good thing is that people always will create. There are bad effects of the current monopolies, but they are temporary.
Are they? Disney has been around like, what, about a century? Popular media makes money. How exactly do you think these culture monopolies are temporary?
Are you claiming that Disney has been a monopoly for a century? That’s an interesting claim.
What I see happening is that the major media companies are producing a lot of garbage. Until relatively recently, they were able to get away with this because there were few alternatives and there was a kind of shared cultural knowledge of, for example, pop music or popular movies. These days, there’s too much media to consume from too many sources and some of it is free or incredibly cheap. It doesn’t take much for large swaths of the general public in any given country to abandon the traditional movie companies or the famous music companies.
Was it this article or another one that I read yesterday that remarked how the majority of people don’t know Taylor Swift’s music. She’s incredibly popular, world famous, but there are so many more people who just don’t know her music. And that’s a big contrast with the Beatles or Michael Jackson. If the media companies aren’t panicking, they should be.