Market Research Model

To be effective, the convention of originality requires the sacralisation of the artist, who is distinguished from the artisan or engineer because he or she is driven to make a ‘product’ only by his or her inspiration, not by public demand or according to a set of pre-existing specifications resulting from market research. This model of the artist as solitary, inspired and, therefore, exceptional goes back to the Renaissance but still underpins Adorno’s critique of mass culture in the twentieth century. However, the rise of cultural technologies since the late nineteenth century – and especially of information technologies in the late twentieth – clearly challenges it, blurring the time honoured line between art and industry. Huge advances in music reproduction, from the shellac 78 rpm record through vinyl, cassettes and CDs to MP3, mean that it is now impossible to make untroubled distinctions between an originaland a copy, a work of art and its commodity value. New creative media have sprung up which are industrially reproducible by nature not adoption, like cinema and television, which have never had pre-industrial forms. Music mayat first appear to be a different case since it existed before industrialisation, so that it is susceptible of being represented as disfigured by recording. But this representation is anachronistic. High performance sound reproduction technologies mean that the record, rather than being an intruder in the relationship between music and listener, is a participant, no less integral to the history and nature of popular music than the music hall or other live venue.