The cultural industry encompasses businesses that create, distribute, market, or sell creative products such as clothing, books, music, and movies. This includes CD stores, recording studios, and websites like iTunes and Amazon. It is not the same as the culture industry, a concept related to Marxist philosophy.
The cultural industry refers to the various enterprises that produce, distribute, market or sell products that categorically belong to the creative arts. Such products could include clothing, home décor items, books, movies, television programs, or music. This industry is a very broad category for some types of businesses.
For example, a store that sells CDs, formerly called a record store, belongs to the culture industry. Employ sellers to sell CDs, managers to run the store, and buyers to choose which CDs to sell. It may also employ people to build or distribute advertisements. The CD store may be an independently operated store or it may be part of a larger chain of CD stores.
CD sales depend on other parts of the culture industry. You need artists to record music. One also depends on the distributors that sell the music, the recording studios that record the music, and numerous other industries that are considered cultural. To produce CDs, a company must exist, so that too becomes part of the industry.
A growing sector in the culture industry is the various manufacturers of websites and shops that sell or produce creative materials. For example, instead of buying CDs in a store, a consumer can use something like Apple’s iTunes to download songs or albums for their MP3 player. Alternatively, they could visit one of the many websites that now offer free or low-cost streaming video of popular television shows. They may choose to shop at places like Amazon instead of hitting the local bookstore.
The term cultural industry is sometimes confused with the term cultural industry. The culture industry is a concept created by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and is related to Marxist philosophy. It assumes that popular culture has a factory-like structure, and through this culture, standardized goods are produced to pacify the population. These “creative” goods do not represent true creativity, but rather a watered-down form of mass-produced “acceptable” creativity.
Culture industry, on the other hand, is not really a value-based term. It simply refers to businesses involved in the production, sale, distribution and creation of works of creativity. While some individual companies might determine that certain goods require mass production, other forms of this industry are more highly selective. An artist’s studio, where originals can be purchased, is certainly not representative of the concept of the culture industry advanced by Adorno and Horkheimer.
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